


The Leopard's Retort

by androsjanicek



Series: Red-Letter Cases of Sherlock Holmes [4]
Category: Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-30
Updated: 2015-05-17
Packaged: 2018-03-26 13:19:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 52,137
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3852379
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/androsjanicek/pseuds/androsjanicek
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Bruno goes missing, Holmes leads Watson on a transcontinental quest deep into Bruno's tangled allegiances. International diplomacy and love test both to the limits, leaving them changed men. Watson and Holmes contemplate long-lasting partnerships. The doctor comes to terms with the decisive influence of the nefarious Mr. Treacher.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

One evening I was backing out of my surgery, key in hand, when I felt something cold at my neck. 

“Inside, Dr. Watson,” came a voice so furious that I obeyed without thinking.

The figure slipped in behind me and my eyes were on the knife, which indicated I should lock the door. 

My first thought was not that this was a repercussion from one of Holmes’ pursuits, as it would have been in previous years. No, I reverted to my frequent obsession: I was sure that this visitor had something to do with my link to the unwholesome Mr. Treacher. It could only be someone who wasn’t pleased with being used as leverage in one of the fixer’s schemes. I was so busy berating myself for having ever given information to Treacher that I didn’t realize the assailant had put away his knife and was staring at me.

“Dr. Watson, you really should be more careful of who you allow to point a knife. Next time it might not be a friend.”

For a moment I glimpsed the former Father Bruno’s pure smile before me and heard an echo of that gentle voice. Then the Bruno of today closed over that spark. I saw the tense, muscular form dressed in the slim, dark suit of a foreign tough. 

“Where is he?” The low, angry voice was the final aspect of the Bruno I had encountered on his visits with Holmes. 

“I don’t know. I had thought he might be with you.” The adrenaline usually caused by a sharp object to the throat had subsided. In its place annoyance rushed through me, and I sat in a chair in my sitting room without inviting my visitor to do so.

“I had hoped to find him.” Bruno sank into a chair next to mine. “I must see him,” he added more forcefully. “Where else might he be?”

I gestured tiredly. “You should know by now, Bruno, that I never ask Holmes anything. What he chooses to tell me or ask of me, I might or might not share with you, but in this case, there’s nothing to tell.”

The other man sat there, scanning my face with his penetrating eyes, which, now gray, were so like, yet so unlike, those of his lover. 

“If that will be all, I’ve had a rather tiring day.” I made to stand up and a powerful arm shot out to pin me down. 

“What does he say about me?” Bruno demanded.

I sighed. “Again, Holmes tells me little, and I don’t ask. If you must know, since you left him,” here my voice took on its own harsh note, “Holmes has seldom spoken of you. He only desires to keep your relations discreet and to avoid interfering in your business, whatever that may be. Though somehow I doubt that the pope has empowered you to accost tired English doctors at knifepoint.”

“Never speak of that which you do not understand!” Bruno snarled. “I came to London expressly to see Sherlock. How long has he been away?”

“I’ve not seen Mr. Holmes in a week and a half. Since he managed to see you while he was on a case in Trieste and then Bordeaux, not too long ago, I had thought it might be another of his dual-purpose voyages.”

“I know that he finished the case involving Lord St. Clair. What has he been working on since?” Bruno pressed. I was surprised he knew of this closely held involvement. “Yes, I make it my business to know what Sherlock does, especially when it is a secret affair having to do with a very handsome, very rich member of the nobility.”

The lord in question might be handsome, though I’d never thought of it and was sure the detective hadn’t either. What irked me was this ridiculous jealousy. “Holmes has pledged himself to you, and he always does things very thoroughly. You only make yourself unworthy of him by questioning his honor, Bruno.”

“One mustn’t question the great Sherlock Holmes, is that it? Should I follow your example and treat him as something greater than a man? And I suppose I am to follow him around like you, being his nurse, cataloguing his intake of food and intoxicants, throwing myself in front of attackers and then writing the chronicle of your devotion for all the world to read?”

His total mischaracterization of my relation with Holmes was risible. I laughed for some time while his eyes blazed.

“You think I do not see it when you are hanging on every word of that director you are so besotted with! You look at this ‘Mackie’ exactly as you do my Sherlock.”

This was a step too far. “You may have some legitimate reason for inquiring into Holmes’s habits, but you certainly have no claim upon my privacy. You will not speak the name of Dougan MacLeod in one of these tawdry displays. I really must ask you to leave, Bruno. I can do nothing for you.” I stood.

The hand that then reached my sleeve was different, imploring rather than commanding. A tear slid down the Italian’s face. I took my seat once more and watched helplessly as the inscrutable man wept in silence with a little of the openness he once had. 

There was no way I could eject him now that my pity had been activated, so I merely sat there in silence for some time. “Would you like to tell me about it?” The close-cropped dark head shook back and forth. “Is there someone I can contact---the Utrimque perhaps?” He gave a futile shrug at the mention of the gentlest of his secret societies and then a sob and buried his face in his hands.

The cold that had grown up between us in the last two years was beginning to melt. 

“Where is he?” he burst out once with more desperation than dominance.

“Bruno, you know Holmes’ erratic habits. Our friend could be anywhere, but he will return. I’m sure that if he’d known to expect you he would have made different plans.”

There was a hint of reproach in my voice, because after all, who was Bruno to expect his paramour to sit around waiting for one of his visits? My guest did not rise to the bait, however, and merely sipped the glass of water I brought hm.

“I have already asked that so-called Madame Yvette and his other madams if they have seen him with anyone, but they do not tell me anything, the wretches,” he said. “They would hear if he had taken anyone to receive the chit from Treacher, or purchased company within their domain. I now put nothing past men, or women either. The world is a terrible place, Dr. Watson.”

The other man set down his glass and his eyes probed mine. “I used to think that treating sick people helped you understand better than most, Doctor, certainly better than Sherlock, who sees the type of tobacco-ash on a plate but misses all the important things going on around him. He ignores so much. There are men throwing themselves at him all the time and he claims not to see.”

“Perhaps for your sake it is better that he remains unaware that there may be more respectful men out there,” I could not resist saying. “Now, Bruno, I implore you. Come back to Baker Street if you must, but allow me to have my after-work whiskey and cigar. Mrs. Hudson will be livid if I am very late for dinner.”

“Ah, Mrs. Hudson and the English cooking,” he said with nostalgia. “No! I cannot go to Baker Street! Do you have no care for your own wellbeing?”

He looked around my waiting room as if it were a cage he’d been backed into. 

I am a doctor and he’d caught me at my surgery, so Bruno should not have been surprised that I searched for some way to alleviate his upset. One of the lessons from his first sojourn in London came back to me.

“Come with me, Bruno. If we hurry we’ll get there before the last old lady hobbles in.” He gave a look of incomprehension. “I like to hear the music to be found in Roman prayers from time to time, though you will have to supply the beads for the two of us.”

The other man rose to watch me turning off the lamps and then followed me out. I hailed a cab and we slid into the pews right in time for evening rosary at St. Etheldreda's.

Bruno had taken me several times before he left London. No one seemed to mind that I sat quietly, listening to the age-old rhythm and trying to understand why it had such a balsamic effect upon my friend. 

He had his black beads clacking along with the group and the Latin syllables attained a regular rhythm. Soon my patient—for how could I see a man about to become undone in any other way?—was calmed by the call and response. Bruno took deep breaths as if he had been held in an airless place for too long. He had also told me that he was very affected by the particular smells and sights to be found in holy places, which he always claimed as his true home on earth.

“The church, she is everywhere. I can go to a chapel in a land where I do not know the language and soon I am in her heart,” he said to me once.

After the meeting broke up, some of the elderly ladies who made up the majority of the participants waited for a blessing from the old priest. I stood in the back while my friend knelt and prayed for some minutes before the large statue of the Virgin. Then he stood and dropped a contribution in a box that gave him the right to light a candle. I watched him gazing at his devotion blazing along with all the others, and for a moment I saw him as the young boy praying for his shoes to find each other, for a wholeness he had rightly intuited would be difficult to find in life. 

When the man came to retrieve me he looked very much calmer than before. “Thank you, Doctor. You understood exactly what I needed. The pope, too, finds a great solace in the rosary. I have attended, several times, a meeting such as this led by His Holiness Leo.”

He took my elbow and we walked into the dark streets. “You have not told me very much about your activities. Do you see the pope often?” I inquired.

“More than most people ever do, although he is an extremely busy man, and my group is only one of the many arms by which he reaches the international arena. I have told you of his reverence for science, have I not?” I assented. Holmes had more than once spoken of this very modern pope who made Bruno’s activities seem more comprehensible to his eyes. “Our Pope Leo is the very man to lead the church back to its proper place. He is interested in everything, as the church should be.”

This speech, which had started off in great reverence, trailed off into a murmur. 

I stopped our aimless walk to lay a hand on his arm. “Bruno, I used to think we were friends, and I’d be a friend to you now if you’d let me. Once before I offered to be a listening ear. Then, as now, I had no idea what might really be weighing on your heart, but a true ally does not need to know everything. Please consider confiding in me, because a doctor, much like a priest, knows when someone is at the limit of their stamina.”

His changeable eyes had gone very green, and their large, dark centres scanned mine as if swimming from his depths directly to my own. For a moment, he was the gifted priest looking at me from some vantage point far beyond the terrestrial, yet at the same time, right from the warm, liquid center of that same earth. 

“I will take that under advisement, Dr. Watson. Thank you. But I would rather take you out for dinner as a way to make up for pointing my knife at you. I have not had very much of an appetite of late, but your tending to my spiritual needs makes me realize I am hungry.”

He helped me into the cab, mindful, as he used to be, of my injury. This has happened several times before, the return of the solicitous Bruno, for he would occasionally seek out my company and take me to a museum or on a walk as if we were still close. This time we talked of London along the way until the carriage let us off in a section of town largely taken over by Italian immigrants. Ever solicitous, Bruno helped me down and then put his arm around my shoulders to steer me around a beggar stretching out his cup from the sidewalk. 

We walked a little ways until Bruno finally stopped at a small Italian restaurant. They seemed to know him well, and he became truly relaxed while conversing in Italian with the servers and eventually the proprietor who appeared from the kitchen. 

At first conversation was difficult for us, as I was afraid to ask him anything about his various societies, and I wished not to remind him about the absent Holmes. We turned our eyes to the past, then, and relived some of the cases the three of us had solved in those easy days while he lived with his paramour in the artist’s den.

“I had thought you would never forgive me for being a thief, Doctor,” Bruno confided as we finished a glass of wine. “You are my confessor of sorts, since Holmes’ morality is completely unpredictable,” his brow lowered. “But you, you didn’t forget my redirection of that necklace until it all had been resolved. I saw it in your eyes for over a year before you forgave me.”

My opinion of Holmes’ irritable lover had been steadily declining in the three years since he’d been gone, but I had no wish to say this aloud. “Whatever could you mean? How were the Pope’s Medallions ‘resolved’ if you never managed to recover them?”

Bruno uttered some phrase in Italian. “Perhaps my Holmes is faithful, after all,” he said. “I am amazed that he did not tell you that a well-known businessman bequeathed a historical artifact to the Vatican over a year ago. A Catholic giving something to the pope is not very remarkable, and thus the act was never mentioned in your English papers.”

“A historical artifact? You mean you found who bought the necklace and he was convinced to return it to the Vatican.” For a moment it felt like a triumph after all our work, and then hurt crept into my voice. “This happened some time ago?” 

My companion smiled proudly. “I did not tell Sherlock to keep this news from you. Rather, I expected him to tell you because it was our first and most significant case together of sorts. And I am quite sure we would not have had such an easy line of provenance without your research, Doctor. But it seems my lover was very faithfully heeding my instruction to that he not mention certain details of my work.”

“Holmes is absolutely faithful, Bruno, you worry me when you say otherwise,” I said once more, but my companion was savoring this proof of his lover’s obedience. 

The waiter had come up to us to inquire about more wine or a pastry, but then he and Bruno began talking in their language in low voices. I had time to wonder why Bruno wanted to see Holmes so urgently, and what sort of succor he hoped for from the great detective. 

“This is a restaurant you frequent?” I asked when the waiter left us once more.

“I have discovered it only recently,” Bruno said with a peaceful smile, placing money on the table. “Working men are my teachers, as they know much about bearing burdens. I assured him that I walk with him in his.”

“You are still a priest, there is no doubt,” I said before remembering that this was another taboo subject. We walked outside.

“It has been very nice to see you, Bruno,” I said, turning my collar up at a slight chill. He was beginning to blend into his rakish suit and become the sort of foreign man you would expect to carry a knife and go on jealous rants about his lover. There was some truth to this disguise, but for right now I could imagine the warmth we had shared over the last several hours was the real Bruno. “I wish you good luck in your struggle.”

He gave me a bitter look. “Which one?” His embrace surprised me, and he whispered “thank you” into my ear. But before I could seek out his face, his fragile strength had slipped off into the night.

I used to trust Bruno to carry his own contradictions easily, but this time was long gone. 

Holmes reappeared two days later, full of tales from some case he’d been pursuing in the Outer Hebrides. He deposited a princely bottle of Scotch whiskey on the parlor table and said, “I thank you for receiving Bruno while he was here. He left me a coded letter—you would not believe how complicated his ciphers have gotten!—and told me you had been very good company.”

“He has many burdens,” I said to avoid mentioning the knife. “I understand him less than ever, Holmes. At least he can be truthful with you.”

“Not at all, Watson, you know we endeavor to shut out the world when we’re together. What little I know of Bruno’s activities makes less sense, and yet he unburdens himself with me more completely than with anyone. That I do offer,” he said with a small smile. “But I need not question or doubt him, because I am sure.”

This was nothing like Bruno’s jealousy. “But he—“ I began. 

Holmes raised his hand. “Allow me to dust myself off from my journey and we will speak, now that Bruno has given me leave to.”

The detective also began talking about Scotland and the murderer he’d helped to expose. He was the owner of a rival distillery who over a period of years engineered the deaths of several members of an old whiskey-making family in hopes of stealing the recipe for their famous spirits. 

We made good use of that fantastically old bottle that Holmes had asked for as payment. Our spirits were running high when we turned to the much more complicated case of Bruno, Vatican operative, former priest, passionate lover, and perhaps many more things besides. I related a version of the evening we had spent together.

“Somehow you managed to reassure Bruno that you are not constantly telling me he’s no good,” Holmes said, waving his cigar. “Since you have your ways of communicating disapproval, Watson, he had good reason to fear it.”

“At times I do not like him, or how he speaks about you. Why would he seek out the city’s madams for proof that you had stolen off to some brothel? I know you maintain relations in most dark corners of the city, but the implication of what you were to have been doing there is most insulting.”

“It’s disconcerting, I grant you, when my man slips into these fears, for fears they are,” Holmes admitted with a touch of pride. “Here is what I’ve been able to piece together. By retrieving the Pope’s Medallions and a few other accomplishments, Bruno’s one indiscretion with a lad back in Spain has been forgotten. After all, there must be many ordained men who indulged in more than a kiss, and were not punished so severely. Our Bruno was privy to the Vatican’s most intimate secrets and breaching that trust was taken very ill. But the Vatican did not wish to banish him from the ranks entirely.”

“This I know already—“ I began.

The detective waved me off. “But still, my friend has to work hard at appearing like an ordinary man. Apparently laymen in service of the Vatican are held to high standards when it comes to physical training and morality, but that morality is expected to have exceptions. To prove he is like everyone else, Bruno is forced to visit houses of ill fame occasionally.” 

He anticipated my noise of disgust. “Where he lays not a hand on any of the ladies, nor, needless to say, the men. Bruno has resorted to bribery to ensure that an uneventful half an hour was filled with the right kind of cries. He tells the women that he has taken a vow, but he does not say this vow is to me. Other times, the girls who knew him to be a former priest share their tales of woe. As you know, no pure or holy thing usually ever reaches a brothel, and Bruno is so popular his secret is safe.”

“I can well imagine a man who still sees himself as a priest hearing a kind of confession at Madam Yvette’s,” I admitted.

“My Bruno, he knows how to handle himself, but he is still a stranger in society,” Holmes said fondly. “You and I have both lived in the world, Watson—you through the army and your practice, I with my activities. Bruno was plunged into the world with little preparation. Many of these soldiers for the Vatican are the coarsest of men, and he has seen a vile side of both sexes that he never had to confront before. His job is mostly diplomacy, much as it was before with the Curia, but it is as though, without his cassock in between, he sees the pettiness of these people whose favor he seeks for the papal cause.”

This reminded me of my conversation with the Italian, who seemed beset with sorrow over everything he was learning about the world beyond the church. “I think that his great reverence for the pope has helped sustain him,” I said, recalling the warmth and defensiveness with which he had spoken of the pontiff on our last meeting. 

“The regard goes both ways, I think,” Holmes replied. “The pope himself gave him Communion with his own hand, and has done everything possible to establish that Bruno is an integral part of his secret circle. He sounds like a very intelligent leader, and he could scarcely ignore such a talented young person. It is easier to surrender my companion to this cause, knowing that Pope Leo has some idea of Bruno’s value.”

Our mood had been roused by the drink, and we entered into vehement speculation about the cryptic message from Mycroft that had been awaiting the detective’s return. “Sherlock, consult me about a matter of politics. Bring the doctor,” was all it said.

It turned out to be a matter of some importance. A Member of Parliament was suspected to be under the influence of a slow-acting poison that was causing him to act erratically—including throwing in support for some measures that no one could believe he would champion if in his right mind. Alternatively, he could be the target of blackmail. 

It was the sort of case that had both of us entirely engaged on parallel investigations for several weeks. I spent my share of it trying to find how a toxin might have been introduced into the man’s body, only for us both to be proved wrong. It was a congenital early dementia, but someone who knew the family well had caught on to the early signs of it and exploited it for his purposes. 

After that I returned to my practice for two months, almost three. When Holmes requires few favors from me I sometimes help at the police morgue. It was after one of these complex dissections that I returned home, too distracted to notice the unusual silence reigning in the house.

The last thing I expected to see was a young priest sitting in a chair, eyes closed, his rosary running through his fingers.

“Excuse me, Father,” I said, and he opened his eyes. “You are of the Utrimque, are you not?”

“Yes, Doctor, I am,” the somewhat-familiar fair-haired man said, stowing the beads away. 

I had been planning on having some refreshment so I poured us both a glass of sherry. “I don’t think anyone from your group has been here before,” I said tentatively, searching for a reason for the visit. “Are your wife and children quite well?” 

He reddened, “I am not married, though I hope to be someday.” He really was very young, I suddenly realized, probably just out of seminary. “Father Enoch sent me. He thought I might be of some service—“

Here Holmes burst in the room, panting as if he’d taken the steps three at a time. “What’s happened to him?” he demanded, looking straight at our visitor as if he, for one, had heard Mrs. Hudson’s clergy-induced silence. “I’ve been patient but this is the longest gap in our correspondence—”

“I was just telling the doctor that Father Enoch sent me to help with Bruno,” the young man said with the pacific air that Bruno used to wear. 

The acknowledgement that there was some trouble made Holmes sink into the nearest chair. I handed him a drink and a cigarette, which he lit with a trembling hand.

“We don’t know that there is anything to worry about yet, Mr. Holmes. I’m Father Emil, by the way. I’ve seen Dr. Watson once in passing at the Utrimque meeting house, but I know you by reputation.”

“Emil is a German name, and you have distinctly Germanic features though not the accent. It can only mean he was last known to be in Germany,” Holmes said in a controlled voice.

“Yes, that was where he was seen, in my home town of Bremen. My parents brought me up in London but they moved back to Germany recently. Since I am only an assistant pastor, Father Enoch said I could easily take some time away to accompany you and see my sick grandmother at the same time.”

Holmes made as if to bolt out of his chair and I restrained him. “Let’s listen to Father Emil before we act.”

The visitor set aside his untouched glass. “Father Enoch keeps in touch via telegram with other sympathetic groups in Europe and even America. He wishes only to share news about the growth of the movement, rumors of a Vatican crackdown, that sort of thing. Some people are aware of Bruno, though people who have never encountered his pure heart don’t know exactly what to think of him.” The detective scowled. “It was a priest of the German Utrimque who let Father Enoch know that Father Bruno had gone missing.”

While I thought about our visitor still considering Bruno to be a priest, Holmes barked out, “So he’s not just gone, he’s missing?” 

I gestured for our guest to continue.

“Knowing Bruno, he could have simply decided to follow another path, another master, though he had been staying with a Utrimque family and left most of his belongings behind. He is a very complicated person, Mr. Holmes, though I trust him, as do the others in my sect.” 

“He did refer to multiple battles, the last time I saw him,” I recalled.

The detective got up and began pacing. “Foolish, I have been very foolish.”

“When was he last seen?” I inquired. 

“A week ago.” Father Emil smiled at Holmes. “Due to the secrecy in our circles, it’s been impossible to ask all the sympathizers in the area if they have seen him, or are perhaps hiding him, because it is known that he had a parting of ways with his Vatican soldiers.” 

My dear friend bit back an exclamation. I was sure he was as surprised by the news as I was, but didn’t like to admit being left in the dark by his lover. 

Father Emil continued, “I’m sure you both know that Father Bruno has been unquiet for some time. Perhaps he has taken a prayerful retreat.”

“Nonsense. He would have left me word.” Holmes halted before the young man. “I have been content to play the supportive role for too long, but I am not some wife to be put off with platitudes! What are you holding back? Those Vatican warriors have no feeling for anyone or anything except their mission!”

That seemed an impolitic thing to say to a priest. “You must know something else, Father, if you came here with the intention of taking us to Germany,” I said, having just seen the traveling case in the corner. 

“Father Enoch told me when I joined the group that the way out of my doubts and despair was to embrace both sides of myself—the priest who brings the love of God to earth, and the husband who brings love to his wife and children.” The priest gave a glance to the pained detective. “What is important is that the priest reaches out to someone with love. That is the Utrimque way, and Father Bruno has been an excellent example of this dedication, Mr. Holmes. You are not the problem, in Father Enoch’s eyes.”

“Evidently I am not enough to keep Bruno in one place,” Holmes said with bitterness in his voice.

“Father Enoch thinks if Father Bruno could be with you more often, it would be like the other priests with their relations—which bring forth calm and comfort to both sides. But then, they are still officially priests, while Bruno has lost something never to be regained unless something very big changes in Rome. And his life must always be secret. This left Father Bruno suffering, neither fully a priest nor able to fully be someone’s mate.”

“What are you trying to say, Father Emil?” I asked, sensing the sleuth’s impatience.

“I don’t know, Doctor,” he spread his hands out helplessly. “Father Enoch does, but he can’t say.”

Holmes let out what might have been a gasp or a sob. “Of course, that is why Father Enoch did not receive me personally—he knew I would have been able to discern something from his face, his clothing, his manner of speech and thought that tantamount to breaking the confessional seal.” 

He scanned Father Emil’s face. “It must be something very important for him to even hint at what Bruno might have discussed in one of his penances. I’ve sometimes thought that his real motivation for coming to London wasn’t me at all, but the chance to unburden himself in front of the one confessor he could trust.” 

I set a tumbler of strong spirit in front of my friend, who never allowed himself to voice doubts like this. He drank it like an automaton. 

The priest spoke. “The Utrimque consider you Father Bruno’s lawful spouse, and we all take it as our duty to help each other’s family.” 

Holmes looked moved, then he stood up. “It was very kind of you to relay the news that my Bruno is missing, but I believe I know where best to take my investigation, and there I will not need a German translator.” He took in our dumb expressions. “Rome. That hotbed of conspiracies that that use up the vigor and good will of men like Bruno.” 

“I do not recommend taking Rome by storm, but if you insist, you will certainly need a translator,” Father Emil objected.

Holmes unleashed a stream of vehement Italian. I knew he had been trying to learn, but was surprised at how fluent he was. “And Watson is my Latin expert,” he finished in English. Together we will get to the bottom of this shadowy world quite well, I think.”

“What I mean by translator, Mr. Holmes, is that you could never understand the inner workings of the church, not least because you are not a believer,” our visitor said. “Bruno is one who has existed in the inner circle, and he has a hard time putting words to what he saw.” The young man paused. “I do not think I am the right person to part those veils for you, and you would not be welcome in any case, Mr. Holmes, Dr. Watson.”

I thought it an opportune moment to intervene. “Holmes, Father Enoch is the best of men and he has given what small push he could in the direction of Germany. Let us trust him, and if nothing bears fruit in that realm, then I will book our passage to Italy myself.” 

The detective strode out of the room and I feared the worst until he called back impatiently. “Do you wish for me to pack your baggage for you, Watson? I’d probably make a faster and better job of it, and we must hurry to make the most opportune connection to the German line.”

In no time at all I had made arrangements for colleagues to care for my patients. Then we were, the three of us, hailing a cab to take us to the station to make our way by ferry to Calais. Once in France we reached the station in time to have just made the train leaving to Germany, but after consulting with the ticket agent Holmes held us back. 

“We must have a private compartment the entire way to Hamburg,” he said while booking our passage on the next train.

“But Holmes, isn’t that an unnecessary expense?” I protested.

When the tickets were purchased, my friend thrust mine at me. “You forget, Doctor, that in this case, I am the client. I determine what expenses are necessary, and it is up to you to exactly follow the directions of the consulting detective in my employ.”

He stalked over to a bench and abandoned himself to the contemplation of the ceiling.

That confusing comment sent the priest to hide behind his breviary until the next train. I spent the time watching the people milling around the station. There were the usual janitors, porters, shoeshine boys and vagrants selling matches, and they exuded a kind of contagious boredom that helped me nod off for a while.


	2. Chapter2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Holmes and Watson make their way to Germany and find few clues except from one of Bruno's secret societies.

The father woke me to board the train. Once we had gained possession of our compartment, Holmes began to speak. “It’s useless, I tell you. I’ve been trying to cast my mind back, but I exerted so much energy in building the wall I can’t begin to break it.”

He scanned our faces and said impatiently, “I have it all here,” he touched his forehead, “Even though I forced myself not to pay attention to all the details that otherwise would have been screaming Bruno’s private activities, I am sure they are still in my mind. That is why during our transit you are going to hypnotize me, Watson.”

“Me?” I objected. “You know I have only interest in new psychical techniques, but no knowledge, Holmes. For me to blunder about in your most private corridors---“

Father Emil stepped in. “My knowledge in these matters is even less than the doctor’s but I am trained to listen to all confidences. I would be glad to help.”

“That is very kind of you, Father, but Watson’s is the voice I hear more than any other, so it will be less notable to me as I slip into the depths. You will serve as scribe, if you don’t mind, so that my conscious mind can later try to make sense of what we dredge up.”

Sherlock Holmes had put me through all manner of dangers in the past, but for some reason I was very nervous as the sleuth gave me instructions and then laid back in his berth and shut his eyes purposefully.

How many times had I wished I could explore Holmes’ mind! But using my most soothing voice to still that busy brain was something else. I concentrated on imagining my friend learning this technique at the sanatorium in Nantes during his breakdown. As the doctors taught him, he had been moving one if his index fingers back and forth before his eyes. Finally, they closed and his hand dropped to his chest.

“Holmes.”

The eyeballs were shifting rapidly beneath the lids.

“Sherlock.”

The priest and I exchanged a look of concern.

“Can you hear me?”

“Yes,” said the familiar voice with an unusual cadence. The face itself was expressionless.

There was nothing to do but ask the first question on Holmes’ list. “When was the first time you recall hearing about Germany in relation to Bruno?”

“Bruno,” the voice said warmly. “We had a picnic in our attic—biscuits, fruit, wine—sitting on the floor in our stocking feet. Afterwards we were washing the glasses in the bathtub.” (Father Emil looked confused, not being acquainted with the prominent plumbing fixture in the artist’s den.) “And then Bruno pushed me in with the crockery and we had a bath. It was a Tuesday. I’d just finished the case with the forged museum artifacts. There was no one left to satisfy but him.”

Listening to these confidences in front of a priest was highly embarrassing. I pressed on.

“Holmes, what does this have to do with Germany, and Bruno’s absence?”

He began talking more fluidly, as if he were talking to himself.

_For several hours it was just like when we first found each other. Bruno, the strong swimmer, making it look easy, swimming against the waves of life. Everything would always be against us, we knew that. But that day we were cradled in our attic bath, and the world was at our feet. All the sneaking around was something two princes could do without being besmirched by it. I only wished we didn’t have to do it at all._

_I was thinking, once again, that I might try to persuade him to give up at least some of his quests, the ones that most frowned upon us, upon me. I was rehearsing the words. “I’ll follow you anywhere, Giuseppe. You will not find me a burden. There will be problems for us to solve anywhere. Everything interests me when I’m with you. It will be very amusing to pass myself off as your secretary, your personal physician, your valet. There are plenty of benign reasons for two men to travel together, and they needn’t know the things I am to you in the dark._

“Holmes, Germany,” I said somewhat desperately with an eye on the cleric.

_So caught up was I, imagining a future of constant companionship, that I was surprised to feel the muscular arms close behind me._

_“You know I can only see you,” Bruno said, once in English, once in Italian, using his body to press the point home. “I think of you here, Sherlock, in our home, with your experiments and your violin and … And it keeps me strong. It’s like the church. After all the ways we fail her, all the ways we are unequal to her, she is always the same. Give her a postage stamp’s worth of land, no, take that away, she will still exist in the hearts of those of us who love her. We need so little.”_

_Then there in the bath, my Bruno launched into one of his excesses of religious fervor. It may sound disrespectful, but I was used to sharing my lover with his mistress the church, even, or perhaps especially, when our bodies were most relaxed together. He argued passionately against all of the different shadowy factions trying to restore the Vatican to some semblance of its former glory. From what I had gathered without trying—well, without trying very hard—those in the inner circle were the fulcrum around which an immense collection of sympathetic forces moved._

_Bruno’s diplomatic finesse had helped draw people in, people from different countries and levels of society. From his itineraries I picked out known Catholics, or else by the newspaper noticed a legislator changing his mind about a question related to Italy, and I would know that my lover had helped nudge yet one more piece closer to the place where it could best serve the church._

It sounded as though we were getting closer to the mark “Which of these pieces had to do with Germany, Holmes?“

The detective then lapsed into a speech that was anything but helpful. Rather than sharing political information, he uttered a great mishmash of intimate details and nonsense that did little but show how whole-heartedly he’d given himself to Bruno. It was such a torrent that it was hard to believe Holmes never spoke about this mostly-absent lover who was obviously ever-present in his mind.

Father Emil didn’t seem to know what to do with himself during this speech. I was, of course, anything but surprised by what we had unearthed.

Here was the proof that I had been right all along about the detective’s depth of feeling. He hadn’t been pretending to mourn Bruno when his lover left, and that absence had eaten somewhere far deeper than perhaps he had been aware of. But I had just heard it all, and with a witness. I knew the priest would say nothing about the raw emotion that Holmes possessed like any other man, but I was wondering what we would tell the sleuth himself about what we had just heard. For clearly Holmes thought his unconscious was much more orderly than it really was, and this was probably not the right time to let him know that one more of his anchors had slipped.

While I was considering, Father Emil had been murmuring comforting things to keep the detective under. “I think we should bring Mr. Holmes back,” I was just saying when the priest burst out, “But who on earth is this Pietro?”

The name had occurred frequently in Holmes’ monologue. Now it was my turn to be flustered. Obviously the entrance of a third was one step too far in this romance between men, and the priest could no longer hide his shock.

“Pietro is Bruno’s pet name for Holmes,” I explained. “It all goes back to—“

“To our first case together, the three of us,” came Holmes’ normal voice. He began to stretch his limbs. “We had been crouching in the shrubbery outside a house, waiting to have proof that it was indeed a brother who had been trying to frighten his sister into selling the house, in which he had a half share, so that he could access this much-needed capital to pay off an urgent debt. Through the window we saw a shape begin to steal around the house, planting the elaborate pranks that would drop something from the ceiling at an opportune moment or reveal a cryptic message on the wall.

“’Why are we waiting here?’ Bruno asked at that time. ‘Shouldn’t we confront him in the act?’

“’And we will if he comes downstairs,’ Watson said with perfect good sense, but our new friend was already standing up.

“’Stop, you can’t possibly climb up to that window!’ I said to Bruno, seeing he had his sights on an open window near the lady’s chamber. There was a trellis, it was true, but to get from there to the lady’s room required scaling one-handed from shutter to shutter.

“’Have faith, Pietro,’ Bruno whispered to me playfully,” Holmes recounted, sitting up. “He then climbed effortlessly into an open hallway window and frightened the man half to death in the act of frightening our client. His shriek woke up the sister, who recognized in the intruder one of the detectives she’d employed to rid herself of a supernatural, rather than a natural, threat.

“Bruno had told us about Italian folk tales featuring Jesus and St. Peter, the latter always doubting the Savior, hanging back, doing the wrong thing, and then being forgiven once again,” I explained.

“Ah yes, Father Bruno and his stories. We Utrimque would always ask him to speak to us when he passed through, and his spontaneous sermons transported us a few steps closer to heaven,” Father Emil said, evidently recovered from his sojourn into another man’s passions.

He and the detective continued talking and I rang for tea. For a few private moments I was thankful that the young cleric knew nothing of my well-established relationship with Dougan and Stanley. Every time I traveled I began to miss both of my lovers ferociously, though in different ways. I’d have to post a letter to each as soon as I got the chance.

“You must be doing something wrong, Doctor, if you can’t get any specifics about Germany from my tried and tested method,” the detective said several times along our journey as he pored over the priest’s scant notes.

“That may be it, Holmes,” I agreed. “The human mind has so many chambers and I am an inexpert guide.”

“If we cannot look into the past, I may be able to help with the near future,” Father Emil suggested. And so we spent the time learning about the German landscape we were about to encounter.

In keeping with Holmes’ dual role in our quest, he was alternately attentive and impatient. His original intent to go to Rome was forgotten. At some point he had decided that there was no place he’d rather be going than Germany, believing that Father Enoch must have chosen the young priest as our guide because Bruno was likely to be specifically in Bremen.

“If Bruno has passed through your home town, Father Emil, then it’s likely the other Vatican soldiers have done the same, and are now somewhere else,” I kept saying to temper this enthusiasm. But Holmes the client had latched on to this theory and his detective’s mind was busy collecting information from our guide.

Finally, we changed to the last of our trains. The father had taken advantage of several stops to send telegrams in advance of our arrival, and he came back to tell us that a message had been waiting for him at the station. “I think every Utrimque member in Germany has heard of your arrival, Mr. Holmes,” he said. “There will be people waiting to share what they have learned about Bruno’s movements with my two trusted friends.”

“Thank you, Father, I am sure that Father Enoch was right to put us in your hands,” I said for both of us.

When we arrived to our destination in Bremen, my friend was more impatient than usual with the initial phases of the investigation. It didn’t help that we had been unable to stay no to staying with young Emil’s family in the already-cramped house belonging to the aged and infirm grandmother. We were thus expected to participate in polite talk with the parents and grandmother, the latter requiring everything to be tediously translated to and from German.

“Wake up,” Father Emil said when tried to rouse us very early in our cots set up in the attic. “People bring their bread to be baked quite early.”

A scowling Holmes walked along beside me, no doubt short of temper at our reliance on the priest as translator and guide. My friend confided to me along the way that he was unwilling to put Bruno’s fate in a stranger’s hands, and so we would make do with the one German speaker we could trust while in that land.

Both he and the priest carried a large basket over their arms. Father Emil greeted many of the townspeople by name, and more than one asked for a blessing.

“I visited my grandmother many times as a child,” he explained. “They are very proud that the neighborhood counts a priest in this, his adoptive home.”

We finally halted at a bakery. There was a queue of other basket-laden individuals, but they politely made way for Father Emil and his two companions to reach the front first.

Our guide pulled out the towel-wrapped bundles of dough and set them on the counter while carrying on some friendly chatter with the woman attending customers. This sturdy, red-haired woman with powerful arms called out to the ovens behind her. A helper emerged from the back and began extracting the loaves and putting them on a long-handled slab for the oven.

Then the lady made a ceremonious gesture to Holmes and me. We followed our friend into the interior of the large house connected to the bakery. Walking down a hallway we glimpsed a snug little sitting room that was obviously set aside for the most treasured guests, two of whom sat there with their gold watch-chains displayed prominently over their well-fed frames. The proprietress hastened us on, however, and we followed her back and down to an empty storeroom that still smelled of flour.

“She’s the wife of a Father Hans,” Father Emil said in the bare room after the woman uttered a few sentences in German and left. “Many people bring their bread to be baked here, and it’s a good excuse for members of our sect to gather at a sort of village center. Others from the Utrimque sect should be here momentarily.”

After a brief wait, a young woman appeared with a baby in her arms. She embraced Father Emil and curtsied to us while unleashing a stream of German.

“This is Sophie Kunst. She is married to a Father Dietrich, who was unable to come himself.”

We were soon joined by several other members of the Utrimque group—all women, in fact. Father Emil had explained that there was some religious friction in Germany between the Roman sect and the other Christian groups, with the result that any dissent among the Catholic ranks was heavily policed by the other priests. The married clergy did not gather as often as their counterparts in England, and thus the women kept the community unified.

Our host seemed anxious to put the silent Holmes at ease, but I do not think being surrounded by a group of women and babies was what was bothering him. I rather fancied that the detective’s discomfort was with the similarity between these women with absent, clandestine spouses and his own situation.

One couldn’t help but see the trust shining out of these women’s faces as they discussed the lengths they took in order to disguise their relationships. The absent or dead fathers invented for their children. The frequent moves. I couldn’t decide why these dissembling women made me feel so uncomfortable, but Holmes stood there, somewhat shrunken, with only his eyes betraying that his mind was absorbing every detail for future use.

Even I could tell, however, that while Bruno had made a great impression upon the Utrimque members, male and female, no one had talked about anything of importance with him. This, even though he had visited several in their homes. We heard of prayer meetings and strategy sessions across Germany, all attended by Bruno, but it was as though he had alighted across the land like a butterfly, barely grazing the ground only to take to the air once more. I, for one, was not surprised that our inscrutable friend should be so hard to pin down, but I could tell the information that was being painstakingly translated for our benefit did not go as deep as the detective would have liked.

Our German friend also detected Holmes’ impatience, and with some soft words the local visitors began to thin out after intoning a few prayers. All but one had Latin phrasing I recognized.

One lady had lingered behind all the others. She was about fifty, with long flaxen hair and one of those faces that seemed to grow more perfect as age and care eroded the features down to the bone. “Bruno is very good man,” she said directly to Holmes in heavily accented English. “He has, how do you say, der Heilige Geist.”

“The Holy Spirit,” Father Emil supplied.

She lapsed back into her mother tongue and the father translated. “He is too pure for this world. That is why nothing on earth can hold him for long. It is of no use to search for him because his direction comes from in here.” At this point, the woman had jabbed a finger at her chest.

Emil continued relaying the woman’s speech as if unwillingly. “She says Father Bruno has the soul of a poet, and they always see the world differently. Her brother was the same, and he has gone from army to army, looking for the right enemy to fight.”

Here the woman looked behind her and then returned to the Sherlock Holmes who appeared to be hypnotized by her words. “My brother like you,” she said in English, in such a low, furtive voice there could be only one thing she meant. Her eyes sought mine once, and I couldn’t tell what she found there or if it implicated me in similar romantic leanings. “Go back to England and wait for him safe,” she said to Holmes in urgent, halting English once more, and then ducked down the dark passage.

Those last few sentences had me feeling quite exposed in that hidden storeroom. I had no shame about the men in my life, but it felt rather profane discussing these matters with these earnest people.

Doubtless that was what had Holmes staring off into some part of himself as well.

“You can see it is quite different here, where the wives carry all of the news,” Father Emil said lightly. “We shall have a glass of cider with one of our fresh loaves, and you will see how much better you can digest what we have heard.”

The head baker served us herself in the comfortable little parlor where some of the businessmen received Father Emil and his guests with great pride. Holmes found himself enough to converse with one who had some French, leaving me to wonder again how the sleuth managed all of his passions.

I remembered when we met Bruno. How I wrote about Holmes as a great scientific mind unaware of the huge icebergs and currents passing him by. My friend’s outer layer was now but a thin crust to me after dipping into his inner streams, and I knew everything in him was rushing to meet his Bruno, he of the most inscrutable currents.

There was an unusual air of defeat hanging around the famous sleuth, and I was doing my best not to point it out. Both Holmes and I knew well, however, that having to pursue Bruno meant, in some sense, that he had already lost his partner.

Father Emil laid his hand on my arm, interrupting my reverie. We filed out with the freshly baked loaves in the baskets. After depositing them at Emil’s home, the detective murmured some excuse that freed us to explore the city. This was our pattern for several days. Most of the time he was off in one of his disguises, but sometimes the two of us walked together. Regardless, Holmes’ mind was far away from me. On the rare occasions he was in our attic room I could feel his mental tentacles raking in every aspect of the German city, searching for the trail of his love.

Me, all I saw were people, the common people who keep the world moving, here perhaps slightly more unsure than in England. In the markets the sellers were cheerful but mostly silent as they held out their fruits and vegetables, with none of the singing and bantering with which English costermongers took mastery over the streets. I searched for the root of these slightly checked gestures but in the blink of an eye they seemed to disappear.

Perhaps what I was sensing were the still-healing scars that had been product of the country’s recent unification. Like Italy, Germany was a recently stitched together whole made of many small states. I thought if I’d come before, these streets and these people would be far more uncertain, where now there was only the slightest shadow underlying the friendly commercial districts of Bremen.

By the second day, Holmes had begun paying close attention to the signs posted all around town. He carefully preserved handbills or copied down the text of advertisements so he could later decode them himself with a little pocket dictionary and a little help from Father Emil. Much of the time he went off on errands, leaving me struggling with some obscure melancholy I fought off by collecting my own written fragments that never turned into letters to my two lovers.

Rather than bringing back some definite news of Bruno’s whereabouts, Holmes merely brought back more scraps of paper after every outing. He had all his finds pasted in a book by now, and he pored over the pages in a foreign tongue as if they meant something to him. I’d asked Father Emil about it, and they were nothing---advertisements for patent medicines and local merchants, for the most part.

Watching my companion studying these remnants written over with the alien German typeface made both of us concerned. “Is this how he always behaves on a case?” the priest asked me one day when he had more attention for us. He had asked me to examine his grandmother, and I had prepared him for a quiet passing that might happen in ten years or ten days. The family took little notice of their guests while keeping vigil at the aged woman’s side.

“He’s always darting about gathering clues, disappearing in one face and reappearing in another, so I’m sure things are moving along,” I said with false assurance. “He’ll speak when he’s ready.”

But the detective said nothing when he placed the ticket to Berlin in my hand. I watched him packing his bag full of disguises.

 


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In Berlin, Watson helps track down information about the nefarious Dr. Zollmer and consents to undergo hypnosis himself.

“What will be my identity?” I asked Holmes while assembling my baggage, in which I had only thought to pack normal clothes.

“You needn’t worry, Watson, because you will be entirely yourself—a doctor among doctors is instrumental to my plans. I will be parts of myself, as well, but we will not see much of each other for the next few days.”

Inactivity doesn’t suit me. I felt a great weight lifting when Holmes and I shouldered our bags and walked out to catch the early-morning train to the German metropolis. We traveled second-class, and after Holmes satisfied himself that none of our neighbors had any English, we talked freely though in low voices.

“Your schedule has already been set by telegram, my friend,” the detective said, “and I’m afraid you’re going to be very busy talking to your medical confreres.”

“I do hope we can understand each other. What are we to talk about?” I inquired.

“Perhaps we should discuss what I have learned in Bremen,” he saw my hopeful expression, “which is the most frustrating species of nothing.”

“Nothing? You were certainly busy.”

“Sometimes nothing is the most instructive result of all,” Holmes said as if unconvinced. “Certainly when it comes to spending five days trying to gain entry to Bremen’s venues for men like us.”

I coughed, thinking of Father Emil and his family unknowingly watching their guest come and go to these specialized establishments. “That’s where you were every night?”

Holmes gave a withering glance. ”I could have given a cursory look into ten such establishments and been done with it in two days.”

“What took so long then?”

“It takes much longer to establish that something isn't than that it is.” He made a frustrated sigh. “There are no places. Or else they are so hidden behind personal introductions and countersigns that they are not revealed to outsiders. Think, Watson, when you were trailing me and Bruno at the beginning of our relation. You found out which places likely catered to our sort of people, only you couldn’t get in if you tried. This is a blankness.”

“Well, perhaps there aren't any German Treachers in Bremen. It's not the premier city. Is that why we're going to Berlin?” I asked.

“Perhaps Watson. Yes, that is one way of looking at it.” Holmes dug in his bag. “I used my considerable powers to comb every inch of the city but found no trace of these men or their amusements. What I did find was this.” He opened his notebook to reveal a dirty, torn-off piece of a sign that looked as though it had been papered over and then unstuck.

“What I needed, Watson, was data about the Bremen Bruno had encountered when he was in Bremen, which we heard was several occasions in the last three years. No one from the Utrimque could say anything useful, and we don’t speak the language. In my frustration, I began looking deeper, as it were, to the sort of advertisements Bruno would have seen when he was here. As in London, these are papered many layers deep, so they are an excellent archeological record of city life. It was tricky work cutting into many strata and then examining them as you saw me do. This particular sample could have been from over a year ago, maybe two, depending on the damp.”

I was relieved that Holmes had been working to a purpose since we came to Germany. All my attention focused on the remnant that must be more than a piece of trash. The lettering was faded away in places, but the translation was written on the facing page:

_“Vorbeugen ist besser als heilen—_ An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”

“It’s merely a folk saying, of which we have many in England,” I said, handing back the notebook.

Holmes pushed the book back in my lap. “Yes, we have many expressions; every culture does. Father Emil could instantly fill in the holes in these sayings because they are so familiar. He claims that civic-mindedness is a very German trait, and sometimes these sort of posters will appear when someone doesn’t take care of their own rubbish or neglects the façade of a house.” He turned the page. “Keep reading.”

I kept flipping the pages of these decayed signs with their accompanying translation.

_“Schälke muss man mit Schälken fangen—_ Set a thief to catch a thief.”

_“Wie du dein Bett macht, so magst Du darauf schlafen—_ As you make your bed, so you must lie.”

_“Wo Rauch ist, da ist auch Feuer—_ Where there is smoke, there is fire.”

“ _Vorbeugen ist besser als heilen—_ It is better to prevent than to cure.”

“ _Natur geht vor Lehre:_ Nature is beyond all teaching.

_“Man kann die Natur nicht ändern._ One cannot change nature.”

“I should prefer not to meet some of these signs when I walk out of the house, but they are merely aphorisms, not even personal threats!” I exclaimed.

“You may be right, Watson, but the last three were of especial interest to me. Particularly when I was making my inspection of the city’s tavern toilets.”

My eyebrow inched up.

“They are time-honored places for exchanging the sort of information men would otherwise never speak aloud. Here, too, I looked for what might be underneath the current layer of penciled admonitions of women’s company to seek or avoid. None-too-honest schemes that might need helpers. A contact offering exotic intoxicants. You know the sort. In one tavern the most recent layer of paint was peeling up, and when I helped it along its way I found parts of the aphorism ‘ _Vorbeugen ist besser als heilen_ ‘ and one name: Doctor Zollmer.”

I was beginning to tire of these slender clues and fear for my friend’s stability once more. “He must be a doctor who claims to cure men of social diseases, Holmes. This can’t help us find Bruno.”

“I have found other ‘Z’s’ scrawled around town,” the detective said. “And that is why we are going to Berlin.” He sat back in his seat.

“But this means nothing! He could be an ordinary surgeon.”

Holmes wheeled around with all of his usual vigor. “If that is the case, my friend, why would no one know anything about such a doctor? Father Emil hasn’t heard of him, nor his family, nor anyone I asked around town, nor did a telegram to Berlin or any other major city reveal anything. But there were a few more blurred remnants from older specimens almost illegible that might have said Zollmer, or in some cases a rough Z shape. You can see it on the back of two of the better preserved aphorisms in my collection.” He lifted up two of the folk sayings to reveal a scrawled Z.

”I’ve been scratching up the plaster at some peril to myself, because in one of my disguises I found someone who spoke Italian. One of the very men who settles his watch chain-adorned paunch in the private lounge at the Utrimque bakery, in fact. I then asked the owner, who very kindly helped facilitate a meeting within this inner realm that is as close to the heart of Bremen as a foreigner is likely to get.

“I told this man that an English client had engaged my detective services to find a relation, a Spaniard, who had last been seen in these parts. All I had to go on was the last entry in his diary, four months previous: “Dr. Z.” Alleging my relative had health difficulties, I suggested he had gone to visit this doctor to cure him of a longstanding nervous condition.

“’If that’s the case, then your friend will surely be difficult to find,’ the man said with his face flushed by drink. Then he seemed to catch himself. ‘A Spaniard doesn’t stay long in our climes. Their temperament finds Germany disagreeable in short order.’”

My companion held up his hand. “Yes, it was the slightest pause, not enough to go on. But the very next day, someone inquired about a Sherlock Holmes with the local telegraph clerk, whom I’ve bribed rather handsomely to keep track of this sort of interest.”

“Was this an official inquiry?” I asked somewhat nervously, remembering how we had been watched during the case of the princess’ ear.

“I think not, but it doesn’t matter, Watson. I am a detective of some renown, and thus my movements have been merely watched rather than curtailed by any sort of questioning.”

“Do you think they are following us to Berlin?” I looked around.

“No. The inquiry with the telegraph office was meant to lay one finger on me to say, perhaps you will receive more resistance if you continue to look around in Bremen. My leaving for Berlin suits the Bremen authorities very well, and makes me seem to have good manners in a foreign land. Berlin has much bigger fish to fry than two eccentric Englishmen. And it was always the next step, for Bruno could hardly have traversed Germany without going there.”

The fact that someone cared enough to react to Holmes’ questioning made me feel there was something to it after all. Eager to help, I read over the programme of interviews with doctors that Holmes had contacted for me. I was to express in the vaguest terms my fears for the health of one of my occasional London patients, introducing the name of Dr. Zollmer as a recommendation from some colleague whom I could not recall.

Pleased that I would be able to take a more active role, I alighted from the early morning train and settled us into a centrally located hotel not far from the streets where the best doctors had their practices. Then I set about meeting Berlin’s prominent medical men who spoke either English or French.

It felt rather strange to be investigating members of my guild, so to speak. Most of the men were specialists in nervous conditions, and it was easy to explain a version of the tormented Bruno and express my concern about his having run off.

“He’s not a danger, you understand, except perhaps to himself. His condition was deteriorating, but he would have moments of clarity. It must have been in one these moments that he latched on to this doctor he’d heard about, and convinced that this would be his savior, he ran off with only this note in the last sheet of his diary,” I told them with the fabrication that came so easily when I was speaking professionally.

“I wish I could be of help, but there is no such doctor practicing medicine in Berlin, or any of the other major cities, that I have heard,” the answer would invariably be. With a few more commonplaces and a thank you, the interviews ended there. These were German doctors who had practiced in the city for a number of years, so I was getting more and more discouraged about this slim lead we were following.

The fifth and last meeting for that day followed the same lines, except this doctor, a Frenchman, happened to have spent some time working at the Nantes sanatorium before Holmes’s stay. It must have been this shared subject that prolonged my stay in excess of mere politeness. Because this man, a Doctor Dupont, was much more helpful.

“If you like, Doctor Watson, I can facilitate your entry to any of the sanatoriums in Berlin, should you wish to check for your patient. Sometimes people are interned whilst they are too ill to identify themselves. And some use false names, as I’m sure you know.”

Holmes’ first errand in Bremen, and again in Berlin, had been to inquire at hospitals, nervous or otherwise, looking for Bruno, so late that afternoon when we met up in late afternoon and I told him my intent to take up these invitations, he stopped me.

“My labor was wasted at Berlin’s clinics, Watson. It was prudent to look, but Bruno is not ill. If he were he could still find a way to get word to me.”

The idea that his lover had chosen not to put out a message hung in the air. He got up to pace. “Tomorrow I will better spend my energies.”

“I’m going to go anyway,” I told him. “If the story I told all day today were true, that’s exactly what I would do. It makes sense to do what these doctors would expect.” I paused. “If Bruno is in very rough shape, they may not know who he is, or where he’s from. We don’t know how forthcoming the hospital personnel would be to an outsider.”

“Quite right,” Holmes said absently. I telephoned two sanatoriums from Dupont’s list and arranged visits for the next day.

When I returned from the call, my friend had gone out on one off his unnamed errands and had not returned the next morning when I left.

The first facility was clean and orderly and much like how I imagined Holmes’s stay in Nantes, which Dr. Dupont had described as being on the cutting edge of mental science. I saw a few of the more modern techniques like hypnosis, and there were music rooms and painting studios, and a lovely garden. I went through the motions looking for my supposed patient and then made all the expected remarks about the workings of the hospital.

It was mere chance that had the doctor leading me around was called away to deal with a patient in a fit. While I stood watching the patients paint, one of them asked me in the French I had been employing with my host, “What is your name?”

On impulse I said, “Dr. Zollmer.”

I might as well have said I was the devil himself to one of the other men painting. He flung down his brush and sat shaking and making little shrieks of anguish. So much the better that the instructor didn’t seem to identify me as the cause of the upset, and simply sprang into action after ringing a bell that brought two more attendants.

I stood back and was soon reclaimed by the doctor. “I thought these were all the calmer patients,” I asked.

“Neurasthenia, hysteria and melancholy, things of that order. Not dangerous, but certainly sensitive to suggestion. I’ve taken a particular interest in that man, a very withdrawn person who suffered a complete nervous collapse over a year ago. Would you like to observe while I question him?”

I stayed long enough to see that this man’s mind was in utter disarray. The whole time I was kicking myself for not being more careful among vulnerable patients.

Finally, I was able to excuse myself. It was too late to cancel my next appointment, so I tried the same experiment again in two pavilions. Except there I was careful not to say that I was the doctor in question.

Using my French, I began telling the inmates the truth, of a fashion. “A patient of mine has gone missing. The only clue I have is the name Dr. Z from his diary.”

“You should be very worried, monsieur le docteur,” a pale man said. And he withdrew me to a more secluded section of the garden to tell me why.

“He couldn’t have gotten to Bruno, Holmes,” I tried to reassure my friend that evening. “Apparently Doctor Zollmer died six months ago. I saw Bruno three months ago, and he couldn’t have suffered anything like this patient described.

I had told Holmes about a sort of internment camp the good doctor had been running for sexual deviants. Unlike other such establishments, he did not propose to cure them, however. Doctor Zollmer wished to find any physical traits that would signal an underlying quality that produced men and women who liked their own kind. The man was collecting information so that he might someday determine which families might be passing on this dominant trait that was corrupting the gene pool, and help breed it out of existence.  

Of course, Zollmer’s methods were vile and inhumane, and his ideas without foundation. All that he succeeded in doing was traumatizing his subjects into wrecks or killing them outright. What was most chilling about this case was that public knowledge had heard about at least some of what went on in this lodge set out in the German countryside not far from Bremen.

The patient who told me all this had not been one of the unfortunates rounded up by Zollmer, but his lover had been. The man I spoke to had been very discreet about his leanings, and thus able to get somewhere when he first started questioning what the specialty of this well-known but obscure Doctor Zollmer might be, and how someone might become his patient.

“I told people I had a suspicion about a neighbor. You know the sort of thing, Doctor, a vague allegation and people know what type of suspicion you mean,” the man said, his eyes lingering on me. “In not so many words, I was told that the ‘problem’ was probably already being dealt with by a specialist who was soon to stamp ‘these people’ off the face off the earth.”

The patient’s face clouded.

“You said the doctor has died, so his lodge is not operating anymore,” I said soothingly.

“Yes, the ’good doctor’ died recently. Died in disgrace, in fact.” The man perked up.

“I’m not sure how he was discovered, but the doctor was unmasked as a great deviant himself. Zollmer claimed that he had been infected by the creatures he was trying to prevent from coming into existence. But his exacting nature had led him to document—all manner of unwholesome ‘experiments’ among his patients, which were found to be forced sexual encounters of the most varied nature. There were numerous sketches and photographs of his own participation as well, with a fervor that would be difficult to coerce.”

The man had given a worn smile. “My Ernst chose not to live very long after the doctor’s experiments were closed down. I think what has done it for me is the silence. No one has claimed these victims as their own. No one will discuss what happened at that lodge. This is my third asylum. Not even here,” the man gestured to the tranquil gardens at one of Berlin’s best facilities. “No one will talk about a doctor gone wrong, whether out of professional loyalty or by government pressure, I can’t be sure. Yet somehow the silence here is more bearable than out there.”

“I appreciate your talking to me,” I said, suddenly aware of what a risk the patient had taken. “My patient is also a friend, and he has a great sense of injustice. It could be that he was making his own investigation into the Zollmer case. In any event, please know that your information is safe with me.”

“I know it is, doctor,” the man said.

And for a moment we exchanged some communion between strangers whom life had decided to treat the same.

“This is excellent work, Doctor Watson,” Holmes said as we mulled over the day’s events in our hotel over a good cigar. His voice was distant, however. “I believe you are quite right in what you said to the helpful patient. Bruno is aroused to fight against any and all injustice.”

He jumped to his feet and began walking up and down while beating against the side of his skull with one fist. “It’s all in here, Watson, how could I have ever tried so hard to ignore the very information that could help me protect Bruno? If you weren’t such an inferior hypnotist we would have located him by now! Perhaps I should check myself into one of these German sanatoriums and do just that!”

I let him vent his frustration at me for a few more minutes before I offered him a pencil and paper.

“Why don’t we give it another try? Perhaps we’ll have better luck this time.”

Sherlock Holmes sat down and scratched out a list of things I should ask of his subconscious. He handed it to me and laid back against the arm of the couch, as stiff as could be.

“Maybe we should ask a few questions about someone other than this doctor,” I said gently. “These questions are all about Bruno saving people from the likes of Dr. Zollmer. Bruno was much more concerned about you than himself when I saw him last, so this deceased mountebank can’t have been the most salient thing on his mind.”

The detective sat up. ”Why do you say this? Tell me everything he said again.”

This I did, as I had done several times before.

“Bruno didn’t say anything about me being in danger. Why did you mention he was concerned about me?” the detective asked.

“I don’t know. It was more of a feeling,” I answered, suddenly very tired. Too tired to resist when Holmes arranged me on the couch in preparation for hypnosis.

“Holmes, I’ve never done this. What do you hope to find?” The last thing I wanted was for my most private yearnings to be exposed to Sherlockian categorization.

“Your instincts were right about visiting the sanatorium, doctor, in visiting several and being honest about the nature of your visit. You have a clearer mind than I at the moment, since I have been walking aimlessly about the city feeling Bruno just out of reach.”

“I’m sure your efforts will bear fruit soon,” I said comfortingly.

“And you were the last person to see Bruno. I should have thought of this earlier, Watson. You are sure to pick up the technique easier than I, who am far less suggestible.”

I said nothing about the detective’s amorous disclosures on each previous attempt, and resigned myself to my own dip into murky waters.

Holmes told me later that I had succumbed very quickly to hypnotic suggestion. He took me through the entire evening with Bruno.

“You were most insistent on several points, Doctor,” Holmes reported when I was conscious again. “Number one, when Bruno took his rosary out of the case, that he took out one of his picture stamps of holy figures. I’ve seen him with many such engravings of the Virgin or several saints, so when you said in earlier reports that he kept it out of the case, rather than returning it, while he prayed, that seemed perfectly natural.”

“I’ve seen him keep a holy card in view on most of the occasions when we’ve attended the rosary together,” I said. “He always had many on his person because he said he brought these blessed cards back from Italy to leave them with the Utrimque.” I didn’t think anything of this practice. But under hypnosis, Holmes had thought to ask which saint was on the card I saw that night.

“It was the one with the keys. St. Peter, you said, Watson. San Pietro. Your antennae were right again,” he said shyly. “My man was praying for me. You said he kept the card tightly clasped between his fingers while he prayed. I wish he had told me specifically why he was concerned. There are so many possibilities.”

Letting Sherlock Holmes rifle through my mind had me feeling a bit dizzy. I poured a fresh drink and then asked, “What do you mean, ‘specifically’? You were aware of some threat?”

“Come now, Watson, every country in Europe boasts several people who would prefer me dead, or at least inactive. London has an especially high concentration. It’s why my Bruno changed his mind about Mr. Treacher.”

This revived me. “I had thought that one thing Bruno and I had in common was an aversion to the famous Treacher.”

“Watson, you may dislike him, but the man has an incredible reach, far beyond England. He maintains the type of network Bruno is building for the Vatican. It’s a profane comparison, but it’s true. Both worlds are insular, yes, but they are actually beneficial for insiders. One needn’t even offer anything to enjoy the protection of such a society. Bruno discovered that Mr. Treacher had been easing his way across Europe, and my man had left no doubt about his mistrust of the little businessman.”

“’Easing his way’? Exactly what does that entail?” I asked.

“As I told you before, Bruno has to keep up certain appearances as he travels with the other Vatican operatives. He discovered that his compulsory appearances in Europe’s pleasure centers had been predicted by Mr. Treacher. A man answering to Bruno’s description was to be treated as someone under Mr. Treacher’s especial protection, no matter what this man did or did not do in these establishments. Up to, and including, offering the sacrament of confession without church authority.”

“He knows about that?” I gasped, not wanting to think of Bruno being blackmailed.

“He predicted it, Watson. The entire scenario was projected and defused before it even crossed my mind, or Bruno’s. Treacher wouldn’t be where he is without an excellent grasp of human nature. Certain people enjoy his unasked-for respect, you and Bruno among them. I number among the select as well, because when Bruno confronted Treacher about the eventual cost of such protection, my man said Treacher was very obviously hurt.

“’I’ve steered a few threats from Mr. Holmes’ door, and sent many useful tidbits his way,’ Treacher told him. ‘And I’ll continue to do so, no matter what understanding you and I come to. Everyone needs someone to admire, even someone like me. You, sir, I see your clear heart, your sense of right and wrong, even if mine is a bit more changeable.’”

Unconsciously, the detective had been imitating the oily little man’s intonations and mannerisms, and he delivered the last word with a movement of his hand that perfectly evoked the species of gangster at the center of London’s men’s community. The mixture of discretion and vice sat so oddly upon Holmes that I burst out laughing.

“Thus it does not surprise me, Watson, that there are any number of nefarious plots against me. I believe Bruno and Treacher correspond about my welfare.” He laughed as well. “Which is why tomorrow I will send a telegram to our illustrious friend in London, and ask him if he knows of a particular threat Bruno may have been concerned about.”

I rose with a yawn. “I’m glad we’ve made some progress today, but I need to sleep on it all.” I moved towards my room of the suite.

“Agreed.” Holmes stubbed out his cigarette. “What do you plan on doing tomorrow, Doctor?”

“I think I’ll know tomorrow,” I said sleepily. I barely had the wherewithal to undress for bed. Then I slept very deeply, though I was sure I dreamt and forgot several dreams that yet left be better off for having had them.

 


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Holmes and Watson find an unexpected ally in the Vatican, which is mostly well-informed about Bruno's activities--with some exceptions

 

Holmes was already gone when I emerged dressed and ready for breakfast. I went down and asked the concierge to send a message to Dr. Dupont, the helpful doctor who had arranged my visits to the hospitals. I had woken up with the feeling that this man was someone I could trust, and that there was more he could tell me about the medical world here in Berlin.

Then I sat down to a leisurely breakfast with a copy of the _Times_ the hotel had available. I had returned to my room to finish a letter each to Dougan and Stanley when a messenger knocked on the door.

The reply from Dr. Dupont did not contain an invitation to meet, as I had hoped. Instead, it was a list of doctors’ names and their addresses, all of them in one of the two upscale streets where specialists tended to ply their trade. There was no other message.

Intrigued by this mysterious errand, I set off for the first name on the list, another French name, Dr. Gerard. When I explained I was not a patient, but a fellow practitioner sent by Dr. Dupont, this physician welcomed me into his consultation room in about twenty minutes, after his previous appointment ended.

“Dupont sends his apologies for not realizing it when he met you,” Dr. Gerard said in French. “I had told him very little about the person who came asking me about Dr. Zollmer, not even his nationality, so he didn’t realize the man you are looking for was the Italian who spoke to me almost a year ago.”

“You’ve seen Bruno! That’s marvelous!” We had to be on the right track now. “So he was, indeed, concerned about this Dr. Zollmer. It must have been shortly before the man died.”

“Yes, I am not sure how he heard about the crimes that man was committing in the name of science. I am a scientific man, Dr. Watson, as I’m sure you are. These types of people bother me on a professional and personal level.”

“’These types?’ You mean there are more like him?”

Dr. Gerard’s manner grew cautious. “Germany is a place unto itself. London is rather welcoming to eccentricities, in comparison, but the balance in Germany is more delicate as a new state, as I’m sure you can understand.” Then he hastened to add. “But make no mistake: as a foreigner, I have been treated very well. My German colleagues are very friendly.”

“But—“ I ventured.

“But they do not let me in to their confidence,” he allowed. “Not completely, but then I am a man of reserve. It’s difficult to describe the medical community here, which as you know boasts many men of renown and those like me who wish to benefit from Berlin’s advances. For instance, Dr. Dupont, another foreigner, has been interested in the victims of Dr. Zollmer for some time, as the man’s practices were the subject of many rumors. Though no one would admit to having referred a patient to that private lodge. But also, no one in Berlin would say they had admitted any former patients of the doctor into a facility here, though that is very unlikely to not be the case. It would stand to reason that people would find Zollmer was managing the opposite of a sanatorium and seek help elsewhere, perhaps with a few new reasons. There’s some sort of policy—official or unofficial—encouraging this silence among the profession.”

I nodded, seeing that my impression had been correct, and that the other doctors had been unusually unhelpful when I brought my investigation to them.

“Dupont has resorted to bribing orderlies to give him information, because our fellow doctors and even the nurses will not be involved in anything having to do with the late Zollmer. Dr.Dupont arranged for you to be steered towards a painting class and several other rooms where a certain patient would likely to be in attendance. A very good impression you must have made upon Dupont.” His eyes made an infinitesimal movement away from mine and then back again.

If the first Frenchman and I had shared a silent moment of understanding, I did not wish to make our common trait explicit with the helpful Dr. Gerard. But I was most anxious to understand my present host’s interview with our absent friend.

“And you told Bruno all of this?”

“Yes. He was obviously some sort of policeman or government man, one of the more dangerous kind because he wasn’t clear which power he represented. Yet it was curious--I was rather sure he was not on official business, so I didn’t ask. I believe in discretion, and I wouldn’t have talked to you unless Dupont, a dear friend, had bade me to.”

Gerard’s face relaxed into a smile.

“A very likeable man, this Bruno. I trusted him completely from the moment I laid eyes on him. I talked to him for over an hour, not just about Zollmer but about culture, both German and French.” He rose, looking at the clock. “I have another engagement, but do visit the other names on your list. Maybe one of them can remember something useful about your friend. I would like to help him.”

We shook hands and I caught a cab back to the hotel to fairly throttle Holmes with my discovery. I found him smoking with his eyes closed. His concentration was so great that it took some time to draw him out of it.

“Dupont replied to my message with only a list of names of other doctors.”

“Very interesting,” was all he said in a sepulchral tone.

“I’ve only visited the first one, a Frenchman as well—“

“Most engaging.”

“He talked to Bruno for over an hour— “

Holmes sat up. “When?”

“Almost a year ago.” He wilted again. “Listen, we have names of other doctors who spoke to him.” He snatched the list from my hands. I had to grab his sleeve to hold him back from dashing out the door.

“Don’t you want to hear what Dr. Gerard had to say?”

“Tell me on the way, Watson,” the detective ordered, wrenching from my grasp.

We visited four more medical men that day. The interviews were almost exactly the same as with Dr. Gerard. Each of these men was an expatriate as well: a Swiss, an Austrian, one more Frenchman and a Dutchman. The four doctors, too, had been very favorably impressed with Bruno and wanted to help—which may explain why these meetings were so frustrating.

I was listening to the final doctor of the day, the Swiss, reciting the now-familiar crimes of the late Dr. Zollmer. Holmes wasn’t even trying to disguise his impatience. He sat staring at nothing or with eyes closed, and this was not the right way to repay these busy men who took time to meet with us.

“We shouldn’t waste any more of Dr. Rossi’s time,” I said, getting to my feet. I thanked him profusely for his kindness because no thanks were forthcoming from my companion, who already had his hand on the doorknob.

Holmes turned on his heel.

“Dr. Rossi, are you of Jewish extraction, perchance?”

Our host was distinctly taken aback. As was I, because the fair, red-haired man from the Italian region of Switzerland did not match my idea of Hebraic features.

“Yes. I am from a Jewish line on both, but neither my parents nor I have ever been religious. We are secular.” The doctor measured his words carefully. “I do not hide this information, but it is not something I share. Mostly because I am an atheist, a man of science, and it is somewhat embarrassing to be judged according to my ancestors’ religious practices. It would be like you, Mr. Holmes, also a skeptic, I think, being enrolled in a parish because your great-grandparents had belonged.”

The man beckoned us back to our chairs. “Now I must ask you, Mr. Holmes, why do you ask?”

“I mean neither you, nor the three previous doctors who received me, any harm when I conjecture that all of you are of Jewish descent.”

“Holmes, how can you know this?” I demanded. He’d spent the other three interviews in a similar state of abstraction.

“It wasn’t a fact that seemed useful so the clues did not piece themselves together into realization. Until just now.

“We first met with Dr. Becker, the Austrian. He had an imperfection in the molding of his doorway. I was looking at it for some time while we talked, and I examined it more closely as we left. It struck me as odd, this posh consulting room having this piece of molding that looked like it had been cut out and imperfectly replaced before getting a coat of paint. I now think it was his way of covering over the mezuzah he wished to keep at his doorway, regardless of the risk of its discovery.”

Dr. Rossi was sitting very quietly. Holmes continued, “With the Dutchman, the impression was only fleeting and could easily have meant something else. I noticed he had an unusual wedding band—there was engraving on the edge facing him. I only saw because his thumb would run over it every so often, specifically the edge closest to him. It was a very thin edge, so that I couldn’t see what the engraving said, but it stood to reason that it was something he wished present only for him but that others couldn’t easily view. I gather, Dr. Rossi, that Hebrew tradition doesn’t allow for any etching that goes all the way through the ring, but that embossed wedding bands are not unheard of, particularly in a center for excellent jewelry such as Amsterdam.”

The detective leaned back in his chair. “And for the Frenchman we just left, I have no proof, other than his surname, Ruben, is more usually a given name in France, but it is common Gallicized version of Rubenstein. For you, Doctor Rossi, I recall that you introduced yourself saying that you were a Swiss Italian. You offered the information before I could even ask, which led me to think you often suffered from confusion over your nationality. Perhaps because of your common Italian name coupled with your distinctive red hair--something one might assume your family had contracted among the fair Swiss, rather than being a trait from your Ashkenazi ancestors.”

Dr. Rossi was blushing another shade of red.

“But all of these meaningless impressions came together for me while you spoke with Dr. Watson. I was thinking of when I hypnotized you last night, Watson. You gave a minute description of your restaurant meal with Bruno on the last time he was seen in London.”

The doctor looked curious at this mention of hypnotism, so Holmes turned to him. “My friend omitted any mention of a statue of the Virgin in his otherwise detailed description of the Italian restaurant. There is always such a statue and it appears where customers can see it. No one would place it in the kitchen with the grease and the smoke. But he couldn’t recall one. The owners must have been Jewish as well.”

“They could have belonged to any number of sects or to none,” I objected.

“Other details from your conversation over dinner now have a new significance,” was all he said in reply. “No, it is very unlikely they were anything but Jewish. Bruno wouldn’t have been drawn halfway across the continent to have such pleasant but immaterial conversations with these excellent doctors who were all coincidentally of Jewish extraction.”

My head was spinning over the unexpected turn our conversation had taken, so I could not formulate an objection.

The sleuth fixed on Dr. Rossi like an English pointer. “Am I right about the other gentlemen we have visited, and Dr. Gerard as well?” Holmes asked.

Our host had gone from red to purple. “I will not comment on others’ private business.”

“No matter, I have my methods of confirming my theory. Genealogy can be tedious, but I’m sure records exist.”

“No!” Rossi exclaimed. “That is to say, these gentlemen would not thank you for investigating their lives, any more than I would.”

Holmes regained his seat. “That is all I needed to know. Thank you for saving me the trouble and the intrusion. I take it your caution on this subject is well warranted, and I promise not to delve any deeper into the matter.”

With Rossi released from his sights, the detective faced my confusion. “I would not have insisted upon the point if I did not think it central to our investigation. Bruno wasn’t investigating the disgraced Dr. Zollmer, or at least, not primarily for the reasons we had assumed.“

“But that’s all we discussed,” Rossi objected.

“You spoke to my friend for over an hour, each of you. How much is there to say about a charlatan? But Bruno is keenly observant. He might have asked one thing and had a different subject in mind. You say you are secular, Dr. Rossi. Does that mean you have no contacts in the Jewish community in Berlin?”

Our host shook his head. “I have friends of all sorts, but do you mean religious contacts? Then no, no I don’t. I wish I could help you, Mr. Holmes. Your Bruno is a man of principle, one who is not content to leave the world to its middling habits.”

Here Rossi took in the detective’s reaction to Bruno being classified as “his.”

“I have my own skills, Mr. Holmes, and they tell me that your heart is in a tumult. Bruno struck me as a very worthy man, and I hope you find him soon.”

Holmes asked that we stop by the telegraph office on the way back. He was in an uncommunicative mood and said nothing about the recipient.

At my suggestion we had dinner in a fashionable restaurant near the theater district. I had thought it would give me a taste of London. Instead, it made me miss both Stanley and Dougan with a vengeance. I ate to give my brain the energy to understand where our case was taking us.

Holmes pushed his food around and observed people cloaked by a distracted air. Then we wandered the streets in the commercial district, me feeling rather homesick and wondering when I would be able to retain my normal routine in London.

Our night was only disturbed by a messenger bearing two telegrams, one for Holmes, one to both of us.

“It’s Father Emil. He says his grandmother passed away in her sleep.” I read. “He’s going to stay for the funeral and then depart.” My friend was busy reading his message.

“From the faithful Mr. Treacher,” Holmes advised me about his telegram. With a snort, I retired to bed.

The next morning, Holmes led us out on the next stage of our investigation. He decided that we should not restrict ourselves to the remaining medical contacts on our list since Rossi had intimated the rest also had good reason to keep their heritage secret.

“Remember that Bruno said he was learning from the restaurant owner, that the man’s struggles were his? That’s what I was referring to yesterday in our conversation about the missing Madonna. I conjecture that Bruno would have taken just this step to join these particular struggles,” Holmes said.

We set out to the Jewish section of town. There were more modern cafes frequented by foreigners as well as the sort of intelligent young people, full of questions about their place in the world, who could be Bruno’s Jewish counterparts. We produced one of Holmes’ drawings of Bruno, and a few people might have remembered the Italian, but maybe not.

“We’re approaching this the wrong way,” Holmes decided after a couple of hours. “Bruno would naturally wish to speak to the more observant Jewish individuals, him being of such strong convictions himself.” 

As we moved inwards into this part of town, the dress became more distinct. People were much less likely to engage in conversation, or it could be no one had any French or English. We heard Yiddish spoken on the streets and saw more than the handful of signs in that language you could find in London. They were not unfriendly, necessarily, though there was a definite guard while we used our German phrasebook. I thought they were mostly surprised to see such obvious outsiders, and thus had no reflexive way to relate to us.

“I’d say they don’t wish you to enquire about their heritage, either, even as they are openly living it on these streets,” I remarked to Holmes.

“Yes, perhaps we should retire, Watson. This case must be handled with great delicacy, and I must think about our next steps.”

We intended to return to our hotel, but Holmes stopped the cab before a telegraph office.

“Good idea. We should reply to Father Emil to thank him for what he’s done for us and express condolences,” I said, reaching for a form at the long table stocked with telegram forms and pencils. A few more people were already there deciding upon their messages.

“By all means, Watson. I have a few matters with Mr. Treacher,” he said, filling in a form rapidly.

An acrid taste filled my mouth. “I should think Mr. Treacher could be of little use to us in this stage of the investigation, which has led us among pious folk.”

A piece of paper printed with large block letters was slid in front of us.

“Dr. Watson, I can answer your questions if you come quietly,” it said.

We turned to look at the blond, Slavic version of Bruno who stood behind us wearing a narrow, dark suit and looking just the same breed of lean, ardent religious soldier. An Italian stood near the door. “You may bring your friend,” the Slav said in accented English.

“Thank you very much,” Holmes said smoothly, his hand on my arm. He steered me towards the Italian while the Slav closed in behind us.

“We had taken precautions should your inquiries extend beyond a certain quadrant of town,” the blond said.

“It suits us better to answer your questions rather than having you blundering about,” the Italian added.

He was like a Bruno with neither conflict nor kindness. I saw Holmes’ wounded expression at this near-cousin of his lover, and he turned towards the blond man. “From whom do we have the pleasure of receiving our answers?”

“We are compatriots of Bruno,” the larger man said. He could have been a cousin to Stanley, this one neither gentle nor sensual as the man I loved. Suddenly I missed London and its comforts ferociously. I was scarcely aware of being propelled down the street.

“And this country you refer to is the Roman See,” I remarked idly.

“Of course it is!” the Italian said with ferocity. “He has no other, mark me well.”

“It would be better to continue this sensitive conversation within the privacy of your hotel,” the Slav said. “I am Janusz and this is Lucca. Please.” He hailed a cab and gave our address.

I had already noted that the two men moved and spoke in eerie concert. Now they sat back on one side of the cab and regarded our discomfort.

Holmes’ face bore a rare astonishment. “You have been following me? I haven’t seen. I always see.”

Lucca said, “We do not need to engage in such antics. We have people watching out for Rome’s interest everywhere. People who know that the fortunes of the Vatican are about to turn, giving the entire peninsula a new aspect.”

“The new Italian state is much newer than the church. People like to know their neighbors,” Janusz completed much less ferociously than his counterpart.

The two Bruno replicas seemed most interested in me for some reason. The Italian was shooting daggers at me with his eyes, and his Polish friend seemed prepared to be more reasonable.

“If you would only let him be, Bruno is a great asset. You drag your unseemly interests all this way and at risk of our mission!” Lucca said to me.

“We finally felt it worth our while to intervene,” the Pole said, also to me.

I was so astonished that they were talking to me and not Holmes that I was left speechless. Holmes smiled a very little.

We soon alighted at the hotel, and the Polish man ceremoniously paid the fare before ushering us to our suite.

Once we were safely in our rooms, Janusz settled on the couch and gave an abstemious wave when offered tobacco, as did the Italian. “We understand that the you came to Germany because he are concerned about your friend. Our group is the one charged with keeping track of Bruno, so we were the ones who lost him. I am here to tell you, Doctor Watson, that you have good reason for this concern.”

The detective cut his eyes in my direction and I understood I should continue speaking for him.

“When was the last time you saw him?”

“Personally? Shortly after you did in London,” the Italian sneered. “He crossed to France and then to Germany. He traveled to Berlin on this occasion, and then the trail goes cold.”

“My impression was that you men of Bruno’s group were very well-trained. You couldn’t keep track of one of your own?” I hadn’t realized how much I resented these people for what they did to the peaceful priest I first met, but it felt good to call them to task.

“We are trained to obey orders,” Janusz said. “Bruno has been—irregular—in some respects, as you know. We came to enlist your help, and, if possible, to allay a few of your fears.” He took a breath. “He never met the German doctor you have been asking about. He is not hurt or harmed that we know of, and our forces have excellent reach into hospitals everywhere. Jails, also.”

“The church, she is everywhere,” Lucca added in an unpleasant tone. “She sees even that which she would not like to see.”

Janusz gave a calming gesture to his friend. “The church tends to the sick and the desperate in nearly every country on earth. If Bruno had suffered such a fate, the word would have reached us.”

I couldn’t resist saying, “Oh? The church is so kind about what she discovers in a man? I’ve never felt that way about how Bruno was ejected from the priesthood for a single kiss.”

The two men looked uncomfortable, so I pressed my advantage. “Why did his punishment come so fast?” I asked the question that had been on my tongue for an age. “It was a brutal thing done so quickly, when I know your church moves like the ancient thing it is.”

To my surprise, the Italian’s features had softened slightly. “The church, she loves like any person, and she wants what she loves for her own. Bruno ascended so rapidly at the Vatican because the church opened all of her doors to him. He was so gifted that many of them thought he was a possible leader someday. Perhaps _the_ leader. This very young man was let in to every secret, given admittance to every group. When he betrayed that trust it hurt many people, and the church herself. You do not understand the Catholic concept of scandal, but it is a very serious damage to the faith itself.”

The Italian’s voice was almost pleading. “I believe those betrayed thought Bruno’s choice to carry on publicly meant he obviously didn’t care about ministry, so he should leave. That he had chosen a—prostitute—over the riches the church could offer cut very deep. But when he wished to continue working for our cause, the superbly trained Bruno was naturally welcomed as a layman.”

“He has suffered more than you can imagine,” I said with the distinct feeling that I was speaking for Holmes. “It’s been years, and the scar has not healed.”

“I have learned more about the priesthood from watching Bruno try to not be a priest,” Janusz said softly. “I’ve had to remind him not to bless the heads of children. There is a priest we know who lets him clean the articles for the altar. Bruno does it and weeps at the same time. Mass is an agony for him because he feels he belongs on the altar.”

There was a silence, then he continued, “I wonder if anyone knew how much Bruno would suffer from being defrocked. If it had not happened so publicly with the police and being deported, perhaps they would have sent him to a monastery for a time, or to serve as a priest in a remote region, the way some have before him,” the Pole mused.

“We do not question the wisdom of the church,” the Italian snapped. “I am sure if Bruno understood what would happen he would never have made such a mistake. His vocation has obviously proved to be more important to him than such things.” His eyes were on me and his tone was dismissive.

The detective’s face was impassive, so I chose not to object.

Janusz resumed, “As a member of our corps, he has been invaluable. Bruno is the best of us, capable of marshaling people’s enthusiasm better than anyone.”

“Even if he prefers questionable company,” the Italian said, looking down his nose at me. I was beginning to tire of being the wrongful target for holy wrath.

“I am not sure whether you are obstructing our hunt for Bruno or helping it, sirs,” I said to our guests.

“We are attempting to enlist your help, Dr. Watson,” Lucca said in a very unhelpful tone.

“So you do know where he is,” I countered.

“No.”

I threw up my hands at the Italian’s answer.

“But we know how you can find him,” the other man said.

Holmes interrupted for the first time. “If you have your informants everywhere, as you say, why are you stepping in now to ask our assistance?”

“Because you are poised to raise a fuss.”

“No more than I have by interviewing doctors and visiting hospitals,” I said. “We’ve been in Berlin for days. Why unmask yourselves now?”

“It’s that we brought our search to Jewish quarters,” Holmes said quietly. “What could you or Bruno possibly have to find or to fear there? There could be no more obvious an Italian Catholic than Bruno.”

“You should fear what he is doing, for his sake,” the Italian said to me.

“What is he mixed up in?” I demanded.

“That we cannot tell you.” The two men sat placidly on the couch.

I sent Holmes a look of frustration, but he seemed oddly peaceful. When he spoke, his voice was smooth, reassuring.

“Let me tell you a story,” he said to our visitors. “Imagine a state that is very vulnerable, but also very old. It is proud of its long history, but must focus on the present beyond anything that would distract from it.”

I could feel the two soldiers’ muscles going suddenly still.

“There is a very devoted army working to protect this state and return it to its former glory. A certain soldier is a natural diplomat, gifted with languages and at understanding the peculiar form of statecraft that is called for in these times.

“It stands to reason that at least some of the time, this soldier would be spending time in the enormous archives that had grown up over time. He discovered old treaties that might be of service, and then tried to use these precedents to make modern rulers rediscover their sympathy for this state.”

This was how I had always imagined Bruno’s dealings, and the Vatican operatives’ expressions seemed to affirm it.

Holmes continued in a mild tone, “If the faithful soldier happened to uncover something from an embarrassing period in the past, and then appeared to dwell on this incident, no one would benefit from this, especially considering it involves another people who are specifically outside your jurisdiction. At this delicate moment, excavating something that happened long ago could prevent things from happening in the present.”

“As would your curiosity into this historical event.” It was the Pole who adopted a warning tone this time.

“Sir, we have handled the cases of heads of state with complete discretion. No one has ever reproached us,” I broke in. “And this head of state being the pope, he will be treated with the utmost care,” I added.

The two men warmed by several degrees. Holmes rewarded me with twitch of his lip.

Lucca spoke. “Since you have begun to see the picture, allow me to fill in what I can. Bruno knew, as any historian does, that at times, the popes and the Papal States have been involved in wars and made allegiances against other peoples and powers. The cardinal who is in charge of that section of the archives has not told me exactly what Bruno was reading, but it is known that Semitic peoples’ enjoyment of civic rights varied in the lands controlled by the church. As they did all over Europe,” he hastened to add.

“We are more concerned about the present. A contact of mine has wired me a little information about how Bruno made the leap from a certain type of man being mistreated in Germany, and a members of a certain faith feeling tinges of unwelcome in the same country. Apparently eugenics enjoy a great deal of interests among certain circles, and some experimentation—most of it not on the scale of Dr. Zollmer---is unofficially condoned,” the detective mused. His manner changed slightly. “It’s not spoken about—Jews are thought to live rather peacefully in Germany compared to other regions with their frequent pogroms. So I feel fortunate to have such an informant. Without such a source, the Vatican doubtless knows nothing about it, and it certainly isn’t in a place to intervene, regardless.”

I couldn’t tell if the two Vatican representatives did know about this, but they looked with something like respect upon Sherlock Holmes. I vowed to withhold judgment on Mr. Treacher for the next little while.

“As a kingdom of faith divested of its land, the Roman Church sees some parallels between the Hebrews and our current situation,” Lucca finally said. “But focusing on today, the pope’s enlightened views could be better enforced with a restored kingdom.”

“We don’t know if it is before or after he began looking into this depraved doctor. But somehow Bruno began spending time in the Jewish neighborhood of every country he was assigned to visit,” Janusz said. “And then he was gone. At first our superiors thought he had gone apostate.”

“This would have been better for your Bruno,” the Italian confided to me.

“We have heard through our channels that Bruno is posing as a priest. He knows very well that this will never be true for him; he has talked about it many times with me, and I probably know him better than anyone in our group,” Janusz said.

I felt a quiver of fury from Holmes at this intimacy and hastened to interrupt. “So you believe he is sick in some way?”

“Yes,” Janusz said with regret. “It must be that something in his investigations made him deranged and he has forgotten that he was defrocked. The other alternative is that he has deliberately flouted the Vatican decree.”

“Or that living the life the Vatican required of him has been one contradiction too many,” I put in, thinking of how upset Bruno was at our last meeting. Holmes looked grateful.

“No matter what his reason, this is a very grave matter,” the Italian resumed. “If he cannot be rehabilitated, Bruno will be put out of our ranks and be excommunicated.”

“And that punishment, while not permanent, will make things more difficult for him at church, depriving him of the Eucharist in the very place he needs to feel at home. I know you do not wish for your friend to lose everything once more,” the Pole appealed to me.

“I ask you again, where is he?” I said.

“He’s mixed in with the migrant workers in the east, as far as we can tell. Bruno has been spotted in various cities corresponding with groups fleeing political turmoil or seeking a better life,” our Polish visitor said with apology in his voice.

The sympathy that had grown between Holmes and me during this conversation sent a pang of disappointment in my direction. Everyone knew there were thousands if not millions of people on the move across the continent, especially now that it was harvest season. Finding his lover was going to prove very difficult.

“The last telegram the Vatican received was from a priest in the Austro-Hungarian empire. He said what others have said, that there was a young priest who seemed to be struggling with something and behaving somewhat erratically. He had the dust of the road upon him and stayed immobile in the church for so long in a state of silent prayer that no one could rouse him. And then he left. The first two priests who notified us were merely suspicious when a man in priestly garb didn’t talk with them, as a fellow ordained man normally would.” Janusz left off.

“Yes, he wore his black shirt and round collar in a holy place. This is a serious thing,” the Italian explained to me. “But as you know, if Bruno does not wish to be found, he will not be found. Many priests have recognized him from the description the Vatican wired in all directions, but they have no authority to detain him. And that must mean he is too disturbed to take care of what he’s doing.”

It was a worrisome prospect. “I would think a suspected madman could be apprehended with the help of civil authorities in any country and held there until you retrieved them,” Holmes said.

“If that’s what you wish, it can be handled that way.”

“But you don’t wish for your militia to fall under the questioning of any police or psychiatric authority,” I grasped. “Not while you are still building your coalition.”

“It would be awkward. Right now the fact that he is preaching imminent salvation in the fields could be taken as treason as well as blasphemy,” Lucca said. “These landowners must maintain control over their workers.”

“Luckily he is only preaching to people who do not listen,” the Polish operative said. “We have reason to believe Bruno is traveling with a Jewish group. But having this many migrants moving all across the land is already a recipe for strife. They’ll follow anyone promising them a better life. He is already suspected of two uprisings demanding better wages.”

“He has not been apprehended after drawing all this attention?”

“Mr. Holmes, Bruno is trained for an operation that is being conducted out of the public eye. He can escape rather effectively. But we think he will listen to his friends.”

“The church believes that you, Doctor, and Mr. Holmes can get him to stop running without exposing our ranks for who they are. We can expedite all border crossings and even pay your expenses.“

Holmes’s hand expressed his disdain for material concerns at this moment.

“That would be very helpful. We are very grateful that you chose to combine forces,” I said about this welcome assistance.

The detective gave a light snort.

“What will happen to Bruno when we find him?” I asked warily.

“It depends on what state you find him in,” the Italian’s smooth voice reassured me. “You will use your medical expertise to make an initial assessment, doctor, and then when you judge him fit we would like you to bring him to Rome. During that journey you will be responsible for him, in the eyes of the Vatican. You are a believer—of sorts—Dr. Watson, and if you care about your friend at all you will allow the church to make its determination with the man present. A man who is sick or disturbed will not be harshly punished by the church, but if Bruno tries to avoid this meeting it will indicate a man fully in charge of his faculties evading Roman justice. He will find no church doors open to him wherever he goes.”

Holmes stood up. “If you wish our assistance, you will take care of all the troublesome arrangements so that Dr. Watson need not worry about them. Come, Watson, I suspect there are one or two inquiries you wish to make before we depart.”

The two Vatican operatives stood and bowed, their movements even more in concert than ever. I wondered how our Bruno could ever have existed for so long in these circles. But even then, I understood that curious chameleon-like aspect of the Italian. He could be fully one thing while he was just as fully other things. We had really no idea what person we would find in the upheaval that was further east.

 


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The wayfarers see what Bruno found in the East, as well as what made him leave the West.

 

With the Vatican operatives’ promises for help still hanging in the air after they had gone, my friend said nothing as he lay with eyes closed across the length of the couch. It had been an exhausting conversation, so I lay down in my bed and slept.

A knock on the door woke me at dinnertime. It was a telegram from Father Emil sent from the train station as he departed for England. He said that Father Enoch had been in touch about Bruno’s prolonged disappearance. I roused Holmes to tell him the news.

“Holmes, Father Enoch is using his own network to leave word in churches where the Utrimque have connections. We are only to leave our whereabouts in a hidden place before the statue of the Virgin, and likewise, if the network has a representative there a message will be waiting for us,” I told him. He seemed to have not moved since I left him hours earlier.

“I shall do no such thing,” he stated. “All of these scheming priests only fear for the secrets they have deposited in Bruno. Out of respect for his beliefs I have avoided seeing these people for who they are.” The fist banged on a table. “At every turn I have proved myself to be unequal to what Bruno needs.”

We had a long road into foreign lands ahead of us. The mood was grim, even as our Vatican allies proved true to their word. Train tickets were soon delivered to our room along with a sheaf of other papers. I picked up the top one and it contained a list of names and locations of Roman Catholic churches along the train lines.

In need of a break, I rang for a light supper, which we both pushed around on our plates. The whiskey was consumed more gratefully.

“Holmes.” There was no answer. “Holmes, I do hate to interrupt your contemplation, but—“

My companion’s gaze was fixed upon the wall opposite. I couldn’t understand his careless attitude.

The question burst from me. “Do you know why the Vatican thinks I am Bruno’s lover?”

“No, doctor,” Sherlock Holmes drawled. “I was as surprised as you when the Vatican’s men expressed their misapprehension. If it was the truth, I respect you both enough not to demand details.”

I was aghast. “You do me and my commitment to Dougan and, er, Stanley, a great disservice! Bruno is a friend, at most.”

He was stacking our plates. “Of course I could tell you were genuinely surprised. You still can think of no reason?”

I shook my head and reached for the bottle. “No more of that,” he admonished. “I have my suspicions, but for the truth I shall ask the part of you most likely to remember. Please make yourself comfortable for hypnosis.” He didn’t heed my groan. “You could ask my subconscious if you weren’t such an inferior practitioner, doctor, but I have learned to navigate yours rather well.”

This was not the right time to tell the detective about his voluble inner self. I settled back onto the sofa and began moving my finger before my eyes. My friend’s voice was all I had to hold onto in this confusing affair that was about to bring us even farther from home. My mind latched onto it easily and I fell so rapidly I thought it must be to sleep.

The hand was jostling my shoulder for some moments before I connected with it. “Watson. Watson!“ the voice said.

“Oh, forgive me, Holmes, the last few days have worn me out,” I said, accepting the cigarette and a match.

“Nonsense, Watson, you were very eager to share the missing pieces of your nonexistent affair.” Was I right in detecting a little relief in my hypnotist? “Allow me to relay between the two sectors of your brain.

“Apparently, Bruno has always been very physically affectionate—‘when he is Father Bruno,’ you said. There was usually a point in your meetings with him in which he put his arm around you for some legitimate reason, either to steer you through the street traffic, or else to help you in or out of your carriage. He was very attentive to your injury. Many times this closeness came because he was taking you into his confidence.”

My face fell.

“You remember some of these occasions, I see. If they were so subtle that you made no conscious recognition of these gestures, they were not compromising.”

Bruno, the slippery Italian tough who had held a knife to my throat, came back to me. He was a schemer through and through. Every bit of warmth and trust I’d ever had for him were now tarnished forever. “Your paramour was very selfishly portraying me as partner to indiscretions very different than the ones I do voluntarily. Who witnessed these displays? Who else would they have told?”

“I’m sure Bruno calculated these demonstrations so that only the people he cared about saw them. You know that he always traveled to and from our attic in deep disguise out of fear that someone from his ranks would see him. Perhaps they were following him, or this network of Romish spies really does exist. Anyone else could not have made any conclusions or Mr. Treacher would have told me.”

My nerves were already on edge without the entrance of Mr. Treacher. I forgot my resolve to be kinder to the little man. “I’d thank you and your lover not to entrust my privacy to that parasite,” I snapped.

Though it was late, I went for a walk to post a letter each to Dougan and Stanley, less to explain what I still didn’t understand about Bruno’s whereabouts and more to be close to them. I merely let them know that I would be gone for some time longer, and to Stanley’s I added a line to the effect that I expected to feel even closer to him at the next leg of the journey.

When I returned, Holmes had the tickets and other instructions spread before him along with a railway timetable.

“There’s your diplomatic document, Watson. Guard it carefully as I will mine.”

I opened the stiff envelope with the complicated seal I recommended as the crest of Pope Leo, the one from some of Bruno’s papers when he was looking for the Pope’s Medallions.

It was a short message written once in the diplomatic tongue of French and again in Latin, saying that the bearer of the document, a Doctor John Watson, British citizen, was acting as the Vatican’s emissary for a period of three months. During this time I was to be given every consideration, and any concerns should be referred directly to Rome.

“They mean to take good care of us, but they are subtly establishing that any incidents will be handled by them, rather than the British Crown,” I said, folding the beautifully penned letter carefully. “Wait. The calligraphy alone would have taken a long time, let alone the post. How could these letters have been produced so quickly?”

Holmes looked up from his timetable. “You are beginning to understand, Watson. The dates have been filled in by an ordinary pen, but they were prepared months ago when Bruno first disappeared. At that time, the Vatican was waiting to see how much we would find out on our own. If we never made a connection from Dr. Zollmer to the Jews, then they could keep us away from this secret they wish to keep about the church. If we got as close as we did, then they’d enlist us to defuse the disaster that Bruno is poised to create.”

My friend made a frustrated gesture. “You haven’t lived with the church in the most intimate areas of your life, as I have, sir. They get in, they have a way of getting in! I had no prejudices about the Roman clergy before I met Bruno, but I have collected quite a few.”

“Father Enoch is all right,” I murmured.

“You and Mrs. Hudson can continue your unreasoning reverence for priests, but I don’t set any of them as better than the rest.” The sleuth made a noise in his throat. ”Do you not see? There was no confession between Bruno and Father Enoch, or if there was, it contained nothing of note. Father Enoch had been contacted by Rome, no doubt with a pointed message about the Utrimque that offered to turn a blind eye if this influential dissenter were to cooperate in locating Bruno, a much more dangerous dissenter. We were set on a course that I did not question because I knew the confidence had come very dear. Now I see that it was all to avoid my seeing the lie on Father Enoch’s face.”

“And Father Emil would not question his mentor,” I completed. Abruptly I was much less enthusiastic about being associated with this many-headed Vatican enterprise.

My friend went back to his plans. He gave all signs that he would be taking charge of this journey as he had the others. I left him looking at maps and went to a well-deserved sleep.

We woke early and chose to pile our luggage in a cab and have breakfast at the station. By now I was sure that at least one friend of Rome was probably watching us drink coffee. It didn’t bother me, nor did Holmes look up from his notebook.

We boarded the eastbound train and Holmes was still in a conversant mood, telling me his plans for how we would make strategic stop-offs according to the coded telegrams our Vatican contacts would leave for us at major stations. He was in a surprisingly good humor, and I thought it was because we were heading somewhat in the direction of his fellow.

As soon as we crossed the border, however, my traveling companion fell silent and the notebook for his reflections lay open but unheeded on his lap. From then on, I took charge of our meals and of bringing us out for fresh air at stops.

I felt a change come over me as well. Crossing into Austria was like stepping onto the world stage, where history had ushered many, many players without telling them their part. There were more people in the stations, some to be packed into the lowest class carriages, but many milling about with apparently no other destination.

For a while I tried to entertain Holmes by guessing where the diverse costumes and beards had come from or where they were going. But he showed neither interest nor annoyance, and I left him to his brown study about why his Bruno had traveled so far away, and how he would be when we found him. The train moved on.

That was one of the strange things about these forgotten burgs that unrolled outside our window. They moved so reluctantly, stubbornly, as a method of distinguishing themselves from the ceaseless change happening around them these days in the eastern stretches of the continent.

But this was only one of the subjects of my meditation on our dreamlike journey. I thought a great deal of Stanley, and so had plenty to contemplate.

Holmes said nothing, and his wooden face discouraged me from saying anything to him. When the monotonous fields had given way to another shabby train station he said, “This misery is no more spectacular than I would find in the more squalid districts in London. Why couldn’t he have worked with the paupers there and stayed with me?” Holmes pointed at one of the beggars set up on the platform. “Bruno left me for a cripple such as you would see plying his trade outside Paddington Station.”

“I don’t think he left you for misery, old man,” I said and then regretted it. Holmes wouldn’t wish to have some other joy replace the one he gave his friend.

Then we lapsed into silence once more, and I continued my contemplation of these eastern depots, which I was deciding were very like the train stations I’d seen in India. There, rumor had it that some among the crippled and misshapen who were living off alms had been harmed by their parents in infancy as the only way of bequeathing a living. Even as a doctor who knew that nature supplied her own infirmities in plenty, I had wondered whether this were true.

Here, I had no doubt that the people I saw huddling on platforms and moving about by crutches were the victims of nature or circumstance, or put another way, poverty and violence. But from my seat I had the surreal sensation that I used to get while watching them scrabbling for coins when the train stopped at a station in the Far East. Then I used to daydream that a district would trot out its most precious infirm as a sort of international competition to be judged by the rolling public from the trains. Since I could never turn off my own pity, sometimes I imagined that this spectacle was turning its imploring eyes specifically on me.

Finally, the inadequate dining service drove two famished Englishmen to sample the food being hawked at one platform. The women wore sausages around their necks and held up jars of pickled eggs. My companion went out and brought back two clay bowls with some earthy stew. I too hungry to think about contracting some illness from the open kettle with its collection of flies, and I ate with appetite.

I motioned out the window to a boy selling black bread. Holmes thought it prudent to buy several loaves, along with two small beers.

Right when the first whistle blew the boys scurried to the train to hang on the windows with outstretched hands. Only then did I realize that, unlike in India, where the vendors broke the containers after you used them as a sort of demonstration of hygiene, these urchins gave you back a small coin in return for the vessel. Belatedly, I hoped that this meant the Austro-Hungarian poor had more access to fresh water for washing than their Indian counterparts, rather than that they avoided washing bowls altogether.

After our meal I was still meditating on the train stations I had known in my life, but

Holmes became marginally less jealous of his surroundings and then dropped off to sleep. Unusually, he slept through a loud clattering associated with adding two cars and several new inhabitants in our compartment. I believe it was the sleep borne of fear of what was to come.

We got off at the stop indicated by our Vatican acquaintances as the first place we should seek Bruno. Janusz had written an explanation of our quest as well as some town names in Hungarian and German, and we were to go down the list until we hopefully located our friend.

Of course, the legion of migrant workers moved across the countryside in the direction of the harvest, which went far afield from the train stations, but Bruno would be drawn to the churches that were located in the town centers. I counted on these far-flung outposts of the Roman church to have retained some semblance of Latin so we could question them.

I negotiated by signs with one of the drivers of the carriages lined up outside the station. He seemed doubtful and so I pantomimed the action of threshing wheat and the word our Vatican friends taught us for “Jew.” Holmes climbed in after me and we said nothing on the long ride into the countryside to the first refugee camp of harvest workers, which was likely to contain some of the Jewish communities fleeing pogroms in Russia.

All I could think was of the last conversation—or what I hoped would be the last—with the pope’s soldiers.

Their story of a Bruno in clerical dress going to a church disturbed me because it seemed to lend some credence to the Vatican’s idea that Bruno might indeed have suffered some nervous collapse. Could he be so foolish as to have acquired priestly garb and then wear it inside a holy place, where he was least welcome to do so? Bruno the militant had been a master of subtlety, and the earlier Bruno the priest would never have posed such an insult to conventional piety.

I feared that our friend might have become unhinged by all the stressors in his life and would be found preaching in the fields like a fanatic.

But none of this could be expressed to my traveling companion. It was as though Holmes wasted only the necessary energy on movement and none on speech so that all of him could respond to Bruno’s proximity.

Unfortunately, we did not experience this for about a week. Sleeping in shabby inns and traveling by shabbier carts, we continued on our errand that no one could understand because it was so improbable: seeking a lost man from the West amidst the hordes of migrant workers from the East busy harvesting the country’s wheat. The bands of workers traveled in large groups so they could be contracted to scythe the countryside together, the women and children assisting with the threshing or renting themselves out for domestic tasks.

It was mesmerizing, watching these people with varied dress all performing the same movements in concert in the fields, trudging through the towns together, waiting at the train stations to watch the movement of the people and carriages as if transfixed by the beauty of motion itself. I fancied I saw in their eyes a lust for any type of motion, the movement that had swept them up in its tide for various reasons but had now, as refugees, become their raison d’etre. This was what the sweat of their brows would purchase, hopefully, in the form of a ticket. Some would go to America, some to other lands, but for now these motley crowds were united with the same desire.

We would scour the radius around a train station and then returned to railway travel. Right before we got to our next stop, we gathered our things and Holmes stepped out quickly onto this ground that might have been walked by his lover. I would find out where there was some inn for us to stay. Once situated, I would secure us a ride on an empty hay cart returning to the village where harvest workers were currently stationed.

As we rode along on one of these errands, I looked at the back of the driver and thought so strongly of Stanley my flesh ached. My Slavic lover was constantly on my mind these days. I wondered if this was how he grew up. I pictured his beautiful hands currying a horse, for like many shy men, he loved animals. I pictured him dancing at country festivals but couldn’t imagine him doing it with women. The thought of Stanley was evoked by the vests that made sense here, the rustic coats that took on an air of sensuality. The driver turned his slanted cheekbones and brow on me and I blushed, as if he could know the passion I had rocked to in a similarly strong set of arms and chest and shoulders.

No one in the hamlet we stopped in recognized Bruno from the detective’s sketch, of which he now had several versions, each in varying levels of dishevelment. Holmes seemed so dejected that I coaxed the man to take us into the fields rather than waste time walkng.

We stopped before a band of laborers and I felt how utterly futile our search was—for there were plenty of dark, curly heads and these quickly blended in among all the others with heads bowed for work. How would we see our quarry among this mass of humanity? Bruno could have taken another direction and be in Russia or back in Germany by now.

We stayed in tavern attics and ate whatever they put in front of us. Holmes had his own avid, waiting look and thus fit very well among the transients. Me, it was my English voice ringing out as I tried to pantomime the subject of our search at these stops. The laborers looked at us without curiosity, and the locals saw us as refugees that were asking something of them, when they were already exhausted by the ones who desperately offered their labor.

One day, we went to another of the increasingly scarce Catholic churches in the East. There the priest quickly recognized Holmes’ sketch of Bruno’s face. His Latin was idiosyncratic, but I managed to enlist his help in finding a hotel and talking with a carriage driver to give the precise direction in which direction he should carry us.

“Thank you for getting us here, Watson,” Holmes said with excitement in his voice as we jounced along in one more cart. “I am willing to say that this is the most beautiful patch of wheat on earth, if he is in it.”

The men’s shirts were in a variety of colors, though the majority went without. Holmes fixed on one of the two black shirts and we both saw the hint of white at the neck.

This time, we alighted from the cart to make our own approach on foot. Holmes wanted to stand and watch, rather than approaching the workers too quickly or letting the driver try to call out to the overseers.

I paid the driver while Holmes was rooted to the spot. Gently I took him by the elbow and we approached the workers. It was mid-afternoon, but the clouds were low over the sky. When we were almost there, a wind picked up, tossing the golden surface of the field to and fro.

We saw the overseers communicating to the men that they should all dedicate themselves to take over bundling the sheaves from the women and children so they could be loaded in the carts before the rain. The women collected their children and their men’s belongings and began trudging towards a barn we could see in the distance.

Like several other men, Bruno put on a jacket against the changing weather. Except in his case it was a soutane. He drank from a skin being passed around. His hand wiped his mouth and his eyes met Holmes’.

They held the gaze for a full minute and then Bruno went back to work. We made our way to the workers, a feeling of relief spurring our steps. Soon, the sheaves were all stacked in a cart. Most of the younger men stayed to travel back on foot as some older men were settled in the vehicle.

Then Bruno greeted me. “My good doctor, I am overjoyed to see you,” He posed his arms on my shoulders and smiled with no hint of the anxiety he had caused in so many.

Our regained friend maintained the same friendly expression but greeted Holmes only verbally, and in a stream of Italian. The detective replied with one sentence in the same language and with the same casual manner.

The laborers were looking at the two Englishmen who didn’t seem to match with this other oddity, a priest who had been working by their side. It was then that I realized that the farm hands were moving back to their camps, meaning there was a conglomeration of Russians going one direction, another group that might be Romanians, and then Bruno’s group, who were all Jews.

Bruno was now chattering happily in English. “I won’t ask how you found me, because there are no two men more suited to the task than you.”

“We had some help—“ I began in a serious tone, wishing to advise him about the Vatican’s scrutiny.

“And a good thing, Bruno; harvest could have ended and we’d not found you,” Holmes broke in. “Why did you come here?” The unspoken other question, why did he not send word, hung in the air.

Bruno took an empty bucket from a child who had been balancing it on her head. He took her by the hand and kept talking. “You must meet Rebbe Haim. And the cantor leads in prayers with a voice that would be the envy of any Vatican choir.”

Then we watched Bruno begin some explanation of our arrival to the people we were walking next to. There was some fumbling back and forth but evidently his companions understood us to be old friends. The men nodded tiredly.

“They’ve sent that boy ahead so the women can prepare your pallets and extra places at the table,” Bruno told us. “You must stay. I want you to understand what I found here.”

His changeable eyes had gone very green and they penetrated Holmes’ for a moment.

I imagined that Holmes was a bit dazed by this new face to the Bruno who had gone so far away to surround himself by a different faith than the one my friend was used to surrendering his lover to. The children were very familiar with Bruno, running in circles around him as he walked.

It was about a mile and a half to the barn, which turned out to have an open area given over to the wind blowing through to thresh the grain. The enclosed area and the hayloft above it were left to the families. Some of the women had stayed behind to prepare the meal and care for the smallest children and the elderly and infirm, because there was the smell of dinner and many curious eyes when we reached the structure.

We sat under an overhang and I let out a sigh of relief. None of my nightmare scenarios had yet proved to be true. Bruno looked very well. The knot of worry was beginning to uncoil within Holmes, I was sure of it.

Our host followed my gaze to the tents set up a little distance away. “There are camps for people of other nationalities, but the Jewish community that has been so kind to me has traveled as if their Russian village took flight with them, and they prefer to stay apart.”

“Do they keep to themselves because they fear troubles like in Russia?” I asked.

“All I know is that my new friends have their own ways. I am very fortunate that they have let me work with them, take my meals.” I saw Holmes note the sinewy forearm as it gestured towards the scant rations being passed around in cups and bowls. Bruno was in top form, physically. “Of course, I donate my wages to the group, but—oh, let me introduce you to the Rebbe.”

He bowed solemnly before the vigorous-looking man in his late fifties who had stopped before us. Then Bruno began talking haltingly, the two men interrupting each other with quizzical looks, Bruno gesturing to us with a broad smile.

“I learned some Hebrew in my studies, and of course I know German, which together don’t quite get me to Yiddish. But from what I can make out, Rebbe Haim is a very wise and certainly gracious man.” Our friend bowed and the rabbi reached out a hand halfway to Holmes and then to me. He pointed to the line forming before the pot of soup, and pointed to the far sector of the loft and pantomimed sleeping.

Holmes and I professed our thanks. I felt positively terrible taking some of their scant dinner, though I was hungry. But there was no other polite thing to do and no other quarters to get to with the rain that had begun falling.

“Your hosts seem to have adjusted to their migrant state,” I observed, watching the efficient division of labor and the blankets that divided the women from the men’s quarters. Some children were crying, whether from cold, hunger or discomfort, it was hard to tell. My clinical eye told me that the effects of poor nutrition and hard labor were beginning to show among these stolid folk, but Holmes seemed unwilling to look at the people too closely. Here was the specific misery Bruno had chosen over him.

We ate in the lower part of the barn under the lamps that were lit in the early dark. I noticed that the lights were handled carefully and hung only on the perimeter on high hooks. The structure was of raw wood, of course, and the pallets were of straw, so there was a great risk of fire. I had seen the people moving up to the attic without lights and wondered how this village of people packed themselves in.

It was early yet, so Bruno sat down to face out into the dark with us and talk about his travels. No one understood a word of English, so we were oddly left to our privacy among a horde of strangers. Once again on this journey, I spoke for a Holmes who seemed reluctant to do so.

I related our following his steps, traveling first to Bremen and then to Berlin, where we met up with Lucca and Janusz.

“You tired of your Vatican corps?” I asked. “They were helpful, but perhaps not the most personable of men.”

Bruno had started out listening with great interest to each of our steps, but the longer a shadow Rome cast on my tale, the more his attitude changed.

“They know nothing because they do not wish to know,” he said bitterly. “That is the price they require you to pay.” The angry man who had held a knife to my throat was beginning to show. I’d rather Holmes take charge of his lover, but he was frozen to the crate he was sitting on.

“What did you find out, Bruno?” I asked, and then gestured to the emptiness outside. “We’re at the ends of the earth. There is no one to hear but us.”

“That’s the thing, none of it is secret,” Bruno exclaimed after relating the long history of mistreatment Jewish people had endured in the papal territories. “I myself saw the Roman ghetto many times without thinking that they were locked in, that it wasn’t a closed community by choice. It’s not hard to find out that the church forbade them to enter certain professions or requiring them to wear an identification badge. But in the sacred libraries I saw these decrees right next to those about the church’s holy mission on earth. And there were more things than are commonly known, in great detail—“

“So it was something in the archives that made you leave?” I struggled to understand.

“Yes, I mean, it wasn’t just that,” Bruno said. “I read about some violent incidents that would not appear in the average history book. Some details were very unsavory. But it’s more than that. I owed a great allegiance to Pope Leo because he allowed me back into the fold after my indiscretion.” Here he broke off to say something softly in Italian to smooth away the defensiveness Holmes always showed at the mention of his one kiss in a Spanish brothel. Then he regained his brusque manner.

“But it was not forgiveness the pope had for me. It was forgetfulness,” he spat. “I started to understand that Pope Leo had not shown his acceptance of me when he gave me the host with his own hand. With that gesture he was showing that he had consented to forget about the inconvenient parts of me. That he was always subtracting parts of me when he invited me for his private rosary sessions, when he asked me what I thought about affairs in Europe.”

Now fully in his angry Italian incarnation, Bruno leapt up from his crate. “He wasn’t really seeing me! And in the same way I was expected to forget about what I found in the archives. And that he had known all about the anti-Jewish hate published in La Civilta Cattolica, a major journal, and had done nothing about it. These were articles saying that Jews drank the blood of Christian children. Anti-Jewish texts were published practically in his back garden by L’Osservatore Romano, and again, he said nothing.”

Bruno was crying with rage. “Don’t you see?” he wheeled on Holmes. “The warm heart of the church that I had regained was nothing more than a play of shadows, a dumbshow unworthy of the representative of St. Peter. It’s as though the keys were tarnished, when Peter is supposed to have discernment. Peter is supposed to be wise.”

Here Bruno broke off to catch his breath leaning against a beam. I felt, rather than saw, Holmes’ disappointment to realize that his lover had been praying for the church he wanted to believe in, and not the safety of Sherlock Holmes his paramour.

“Surely forgiveness is one of the cardinal virtues,” I ventured.

“I thought if I could make things better, make amends. The church, she is beautiful and loving. She is mercy itself,” Bruno explained. “I had heard about Dr. Zollmer from the dens of sin I was sometimes forced to visit with the other soldiers.”

He smiled and uttered another few words in Italian at Holmes’ wary look. “There, men passed along the word about this so-called medical man, that one should not accept recommendations of a doctor from just anyone, and that they should above all be discreet so that a neighbor didn’t find reason to trick them into the clutches of that madman.”

“People were lured into that place by their neighbors?” I asked.

He nodded. “I heard things but, in my position, I was the last person to risk my station trying to put an end to it. I spread the word in my travels, nothing more.

“When I became interested in the church’s treatment of Jewish folk, I decided to talk to some Italian Jews. I realized I had not made much effort to get to know them, though I had grown up not far from the large enclave in Rome. I had done a little Hebrew in my scripture studies, and I contracted someone to teach me more. Naturally we talked of many things as well. They are a people with a long memory.”

Here Holmes interrupted. “You tell me often that the church is very old, and the pope, he is not a young man either. Should they both dwell on the bad when there is so much to be done in the present?”

“It isn’t only in the past!” Bruno cut him off. “The worst was when I found out that His Holiness Leo is so concerned about keeping the Austrians as potential allies that he has made friends with a political circle that hates Jews as much as the worst of the Roman tradition.”

Then Bruno burst out so loud that several people looked over. “Besides, Sherlock, you should know: I forget nothing! Every cipher you’ve ever taught me, every disguise you’ve ever worn, every case you’ve ever discussed and some you haven’t. Do you not know that’s what I count upon with you—that you, like me, never forget?”

Holmes was stunned for a moment, doubtless at all his efforts to forget his impressions of Bruno having been in the wrong direction.

“I am very tired,” I said sincerely. “I’ll find my way to our pallets upstairs.”

Bruno reached a hand to my arm. “Thank you, Doctor, for all you have done to get here.” I thought he could see very well that Holmes had not been able to take the lead.

He paused. “I wonder if I might ask you for one more favor tomorrow. There are some people here who could benefit from a doctor’s attention. I have some savings from my soldier’s pay. Would you agree to examine a few people and determine who would most benefit from the medicine available in the local pharmacy? There are others who can pay a little.”

“Of course,” I said. Anything was better than witnessing Holmes’ hopes for an idyllic reunion being dashed.

I climbed up a ladder and let my eyes adjust to the darkness. The farm owner had fastened ropes to the beams so that there was a sort of suspended railing for people to feel their way in the dark if they needed the privy. It was wonderfully easy to fall asleep in these uncomfortable quarters. The groans and snores made me dream of the army.

At some very late hour I heard Holmes come in. He couldn’t have gotten much sleep, for he was gone when I awoke. The fact that neither Bruno nor Holmes was at breakfast could bode well or ill.

I was respectfully passed a bowl of gruel and some herbal brew that tasted of chicory. When I was finished, some people were waiting politely.

It happened much like India. These people wanted me to use the few instruments I always bring with me and perform a ritual that would dignify their poverty, their labor and all of their hopes.

I employed the pantomime skills I learned in India to ascertain what little I could about their maladies. My stethoscope and otoscope and my little reflex hammer weren’t needed to tell me that there were some who would surely not make it to their destination, which was New York. But these ancient and infirm knew it as well, and it was a wordless play we put on together for their relatives.

The children I could examine more confidently. They needed delousing and some, deworming. A good bottle of cod liver oil would help everyone. The pregnant women tried my patience the most because everything in me wanted to take them to some place where they could await the birth in cleanliness and comfort, rather than among the straw. They looked at me calculatingly, wondering if I would stay long enough to assist, but not expecting such a luxury. They’d lost their doctor in the pogrom, and all that mattered was staying in motion.

Overall, I extracted a few teeth, made note of the ingredients for my favored delousing and deworming solutions, and communicated by signs which people could hope for some benefit from the cleansing solution I would prepare for their wounds.

 

I had nothing more than that muddy-tasting tea to sustain me. At the end of the day I was exhausted and had forgotten about the two men who had gotten me into this predicament. Our German phrase-book had helped me find someone to take me to town the next day to see what could be obtained from the backwater pharmacy, if and only if the chemist had some background in Latin.

I sat outside watching the sunset and taking a discreet sip from my treasured last inches in my flask. If no good was going to come from this long journey, at least I had put in a good day’s work. The state of my abandoned practice was too worrisome to consider with my ravenous hunger.

Some of the children ran around after dinner mimicking my exaggerated gestures from earlier. My doctor’s pidgin was almost as universal as the games little ones manage to play among the grime. I ate the frugal meal feeling at least that I had earned it.

Some food was set aside for their Italian guest and his guest. I wondered at how Bruno’s charisma could reach anyone, overcome any language or faith. These people treated him with the utmost respect, sharing their food and their shelter with no real shared language between them.

Shortly after dinner the exhaustion took hold of me. I lay down on the pallet and committed my recent experiences to memory for when I would have a chance to write them to Stanley. When I would eventually write them down, it would be twice, once for the prince who felt so near to me in these eastern lands, and one more time to Dougan, whose love required only that I tell him how I loved this other man who claimed a different part of me.

Stanley had told me very little of his early years at court but a great deal about his beloved home in the country. Whatever had happened with his family had left him twice mute—once from his impediment, which was much worse in his early years, and once from shame over this trait.

Luckily, his parents had left their fortunes at the disposal of his distant relatives, an older couple who were delighted to adopt the child they’d never had. These country folk with noble blood had heard the boy liked drawing and music, and they’d contracted a master in each field along with a schoolmaster for general studies. Three gentle men had been chosen, and they set about coaxing the withdrawn boy back to the world.

If Stanley had not been so fortunate, he would have remained broken and incapable. I am sure of it. But the music teacher and the artist were the ones who helped give him the confidence to speak.

They would take him out into the countryside or climb into the wild woods, and begin to play or draw, as was their art. Far away from any watchful eyes, the boy soon began to join in, and they would have visual or musical conversations about their environment. His teachers would also talk, and with much patience they encouraged the royal outcast to answer as well as he could.

My mind had been collecting impressions of all these foreign men I’d seen waiting at stations and working in the fields. They had taught me that what was most fascinating about Stanley was not the covert prince, but these men whose movements were quiet, patient and sure.                  

Every time I saw Stanley he warmed some part of me that I hadn’t realized had gone cold. Watching my excitement wash across his face in a slow smile, feeling my body melt under his strength—

It was good I continued the rest of my longing in my dreams, as at some point the other people began filing in. What do these people do when the urge comes upon them? I half-thought.

My mind was busy making up for my long absence from Stanley, so I didn’t hear Holmes come back. 

 


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bruno reveals his true nature, and the group encounters some unexpected trouble.

 

Sherlock Holmes must have returned, because very early the next morning a sleep-tousled detective woke me up.

“Watson.”

“Watson!”

“What?” I grumbled with eyes closed, wanting to stay in my nice night of dreams.

“Do you have a jacket that Bruno can borrow?” my friend whispered.

I opened my eyes at this trivial request.

“Why? He has clothes, surely.”

“Come now, Watson, he can’t very well wear his current garb when he travels back to England,” Holmes chided me, completely himself once more.

I sat up and saw Bruno sitting there smiling.

“It is just to ride on the cart to town, so that I can obtain my own clothes if this place has any kind of a decent tailor,” the Italian said. “This is important, Doctor. I have worn so many disguises in the last few years since I gave up the cassock, with none of them feeling quite natural. Sherlock has agreed to take me to every men’s tailor in Rome while we are there, until I find what feels like a second skin.”

It was as though these years of separation had never happened. The two men were side by side, united in being several steps ahead of me once more.

“I can’t wait to return to England,” I admitted, shaking the straw from my hair.

“Bit by bit, Watson. Today Bruno and I will seek out a bath, a barber, the tailor, a telegraph operator and train tickets,” Holmes murmured playfully. “I shall visit a tobacconist while the tailor plies his trade.”

“Your ride into town leaves very early, so there’s no time to waste, doctor,” Bruno reminded me. “You won’t mind if we come along to your errand at the chemist’s?”

I had forgotten all about it, actually. While I scrambled into my clothes, I offered Bruno one of my two jackets that happened to be in my small bag, as most of my luggage was still at the hotel. It was as I feared: he had always had wide shoulders and after frequent exercise his powerful arms couldn’t fit in my narrow cut. Holmes’ clothes were no doubt both too narrow and too long.

“It’s fine, Doctor, I’m sure there is something for me in the town, even if they make me look like a burgher with their rustic styles.”

“We have both worn worse to travel London together,” Holmes recalled.

I finished dressing and moved stiffly as I followed my two friends down the ladder. Perhaps it was from too-vigorous pantomiming in the course of my duties the day before. Or it could have been wrenching out the teeth.

Bruno held out his hand to help me down the last few rungs. I pushed away the thought that his help had some sort of ulterior motive, as I had discovered his physical affection had had in the past.

“I am sorry, Doctor Watson, you spent a long day ministering to our hosts while Sherlock and I did no work at all,” the Italian said to my slight scowl. “I took him all around, explained how the harvest is set up, the different peoples I’ve met. The children came along and they told us stories and played games.”

It was naturally quite impossible to imagine Holmes doing these things. Though he was much more at ease today than he had been since Bruno disappeared, a different tension was in place as we walked to meet the cart.

My friend had that same controlled look as when Bruno told the story of the second slipper. There was no substitute for the now-animated Italian who chattered on while we walked to the stables. Holmes couldn’t kiss Bruno as a distraction this time, but I sensed a deep terror that this singular person would slip away again.

I never heard what specifically had changed Bruno’s mind to return with us during their day walking in the countryside. I liked to think that Bruno realized that he and Holmes had grown together so much that they did share each other’s battles. “Their battles are mine,” was how Bruno had translated his conversation with the waiter in the restaurant the last time I saw him in London. When the couple reunited he must have seen that the great detective did not at all care where they were, as long as they could be together.

“You must admit, Watson, that my system for harvesting and threshing wheat deserves to be tested,” the detective was saying. The two men argued about ways to improve agricultural efficiency, stopping only long enough for Bruno to tell the driver that he was taking four people into town.

“Four?” I questioned the number of fingers Bruno held up. I looked over my shoulder and the man I recognized as the cantor was coming up behind us.

“You will need someone to manage all your packages, and Rebbe Haim wanted to contribute some of the community money to supplies,” Bruno explained.

The couple spent the dusty journey carrying on in rapid-fire Italian. The cantor and I smiled pleasantly and watched the fields thin into the town that was barely a railroad junction.

“Go first thing to the inn to see that they haven’t thrown out our extra bags,” I admonished.

“Don’t worry, Watson, I expect the several days our paid rooms lay empty will more than make up for our thorough baths today,” Holmes said.

My Jewish friend pointed to the universal sign of the apothecary, and we entered the cramped little shop.

As it happened, the proprietor did have some Latin. He recognized my prescriptions very well and set about mixing the various solutions while we conversed haltingly.

“How did an English doctor get mixed up with a bunch of refugees?” he asked me.

“A friend and I came looking for another friend who was lost,” I said, gratefully sipping the tea that tasted like real tea. The cantor was savoring it as well. He was able to communicate a little with our host in some combination of languages.

“Lost from London to here is quite lost,” the chemist said, clucking his tongue at the amount of delousing fluid I’d requested.

“Could you ask my friend something?” I said suddenly to the shopkeeper. All of my contact with Bruno’s adoptive village had come through the Italian, and I couldn’t ask him any of my real questions.

“Just a moment.”

He attended to a customer and when he’d returned, I had my question ready.

“Can you ask him why his group has adopted an Italian Catholic?”

The two men conferred for some minutes in a broken conversation. I began to fear this was an indelicate inquiry, but the cantor was serene as the other man returned to his mixtures.

“He says that your friend came to them lost. A Jew is never lost because everywhere is his home. They offered him the one thing they had.”

I thanked the chemist and bowed at the cantor, allowing the shopkeeper to explain that I’d like to meet my friends if he would like to carry our parcels back to the camp. Between Bruno’s money, mine, and that of the village, the medicines would be packed and transported in the cart left waiting outside.

My desperation for a bath sent me to the hotel, where my last clean-ish clothes were waiting. Bruno and Holmes had come and gone, but I found them at the tailor’s.

“My man in London could have a jacket and shirt ready in no time,” Holmes was saying as the Italian modeled an outmoded coat that was being pinned to his frame.

The detective’s demeanor had thawed several more degrees. I was sure that he felt much better about Bruno when the latter wasn’t wearing the dress of a consecrated man. Secretly, I thought Bruno looked better in a priest’s weeds, but could understand why his lover felt otherwise.

The affectionate look on my friend’s face reminded me of something. “Where do married couples go for a little privacy? These villagers have been on the road for months, and several pregnancies tell me they must find somewhere to go.”

“They go into the fields, doctor, where else? This I discovered much to my chagrin when Bruno led me out there last night. We walked a great ways from the camp and were deep into the wheat passing a very enjoyable time, and then two more couples situated themselves in the same sector. As you know, it takes a great deal of concentration to maintain a false voice in the best of circumstances, so unless one of us could keep complete silence our two male voices, not to say appearance, would have attracted attention. We had no choice but to lie very still and wait for our neighbors to leave. Bruno and I found ways to pass the time, however.”

Holmes licked his lips at my discomfort.

As if he had heard, Bruno glanced over with that masterful look I remembered from their artist’s den in London. I could hardly believe this amorous Bruno had won out over all the others vying for control.

While his suit was being confected, our friend decided to buy and wear one of the loose-sleeved white peasant blouses that Stanley favored because it needed no tailoring. The blue suit pants had fit as they were. Dressed as a part-priest, part laborer, part gentleman, Bruno pushed us out onto the street.

We had what passed for a feast in these parts: sweet sausages and some kind of dumplings.

We were on our way to the barber next when Bruno stopped us. “Will you go in with me? I would very much like to invite you both.”

Mystified, I followed the other two men through a door with peeling blue paint jammed between other businesses in the small commercial district.

My eyes took several moments to adjust down a short hallway. Then there were a few gas lamps burning but the illumination was multiplied by all the gold and silver.

The icons were smattered with gold leaf, which was also inlaid in the ceiling. Many sets of eyes seemed to follow us from all the icons covering the walls. One of the pieces of this dizzying landscape moved and I at last made out the sacristan with a gold candlestick in in hand and a cloth in the other.

Bruno made a reverence and knelt down before the altar to pray.

“Bruno told me that he asked around for a church and heard of this place. There is an old priest who lives above this small chapel and celebrates a private service every week for those too aged or ill to make the journey to the real Orthodox church in a neighboring town,” Holmes whispered. “Apparently this place is modest compared to full-sized splendor.”

Our friend suddenly abandoned his kneeling posture and lay facedown full-length before the altar, arms outstretched.

I wish I hadn’t seen it. I know Holmes would rather anything other than his lover’s unchanged religious fervor be displaying itself at this moment. This was the pose of a priest, an unrepentant priest.

The sacristan had not welcomed the interruption of three foreigners, one of them an Italian in some indeterminate half-priest state and sporting a wild head of hair and a ragged beard. The man had been watching Holmes and me closely to see if we were there to steal any of the costly relics crammed in the small room. We were obviously insensible to his tirade, as he was to our faltering explanations.

With one of this suspicious party insensible before the altar and the other two left aghast in the back, the sacristan made a threatening gesture with his candlestick and stormed off.

It’s hard to explain what makes a scientific-minded Englishman so uncomfortable before such religious passion. I thought of the woman in Bremen who told us Bruno had been touched by the spirit, and that he followed some compass that would always leave his friends stumbling behind.

Holmes and I had grown so close in this journey that I knew we were thinking the same thing. Bruno was the sort of person we’d always ascribed to an emotional nature, one that preferred to fill in the doubts in life with some comforting assumptions. But this man with his body arranged like a cross was undoubtedly something that we were not—an exemplar of another order that made us look at our own world through the wrong end of a spyglass. We were small in comparison. It was uncomfortable. What’s more, our prostrate companion would never be held entirely in our world. I caught Holmes eying the soutane covering the inert form with a sort of fear of this living membrane of Bruno’s stubborn priestliness.

The door opened and an ancient patriarch creaked in. He affixed his pince-nez and took in the two uncomfortable Englishmen in the back and then turned to the long-haired, peasant-shirted, blue-trousered, soutane-clad body supine before the Sacrament displayed in a gold cross.

The sacristan was uttering some argument and the old priest motioned for us to follow him outside. He shut the door very firmly behind us and made it clear he would like to be invited to tea at the café within sight of the church.

Other than the time when I was hiding from the police after a raid, I had never felt so ashamed of my forbidden romantic leanings as during this uncomfortable wait. It was as though I was sitting with my deceased parents and they could see my relationships with Stanley and Dougan written all over my face. We couldn’t converse at all, so there was nothing to do but sit there with the sacristan and the priest studying us for clues about our strange party.

Finally, Bruno emerged and the sacristan darted back inside, doubtless to count the candlesticks.

We were all bowing our thanks when the chemist came running up to us.

“Something has happened. Your friends should depart immediately,” he said to me in Latin.

My heart sank, and when Bruno translated I could see some light begin to go out of the detective’s eyes.

Bruno began interrogating the apothecary as we followed him down the street, but the man who had been so friendly to me shortly before had gone stiff in his manner to me, and he refused to acknowledge my friends’ presence.

“Your companions were seen in company last night, Doctor. Coming out of the fields,” he said with emphasis. “If he were an Orthodox priest in the company of his wife, perhaps, but there is no excuse for a Roman clergyman cavorting with another man.”

A policeman came up to us and put a hand on Bruno, and another came to claim Holmes. All was done in the universal language of authority. There could be no doubt that we were in for some kind of bother.

Bruno began relaying the calamity to Holmes, but the chemist would still look only at me. “They must have ended up by the Romanian camp, because that group was talking about the scandal when they gathered for work this morning. One overseer told another farm worker and it’s all over the countryside. As a doctor, you can say you were searching for two sick men, but no one is likely to sympathize with two foreigners with such tastes.”

It’s difficult to untangle the next few hours in my mind. We were called before the mayor at a local police station, where there was a great deal of shouting in multiple languages. The chemist was still there, and he tried to help me explain the Vatican letters Holmes and I were waving about, though it was not sure at this point that Rome would claim Bruno after another public romantic scandal. Someone dragged the old patriarch in along with the sacristan, and I wasn’t sure anymore which of Bruno’s irregularities were on trial—religious or romantic.

The fact that Bruno had thrown away the only papers he had out of anger at the Vatican meant that he was an unknown entity, a blank screen for everyone else’s projections. This would become clear when we were hauled to a bigger town for another interrogation.

My prescriptions had been produced by the helpful apothecary, who obviously couldn’t conceive that I was a member of the same hated class as Bruno and Holmes. Those authentic papers and my instruments set me apart from the unseemliness that had taken place among the wheat.

“They think you’re someone else, Doctor!” the chemist shouted as we were being carried away what he had been trying to communicate to me during this confused conversation. “Labor agitators aren’t received well in these parts!”

Out of deference to my doctor’s role, I and my bag with the few doctor’s implements proclaiming my profession were sat up front between the driver and the police chief. Bruno and Holmes had their arms bound with rope behind their backs and fastened to the vehicle. When I looked back, the detective was sitting staring at nothing. Bruno answered the fear in my eyes with a small shake of his head. No, they would not try some ill-advised escape.

This ride in a jouncing cart was very different than the one from this morning.

We found out that we were subjected to this long, uncomfortable ride because this magistrate had some French and thus could get to the bottom of who we were and why we were there, mixing around with the migrants at harvest time.

This functionary was much like you would expect any civil authority to be in a medium-sized town that put on airs about not being a small town. He had neatly combed black hair and an aggressive moustache, his head floating above some insignia-encrusted suit that was much cleaner than we were after that dusty ride.

There was another man in the room, who I at first took for another prisoner. This bespectacled person was shrinking in the corner until the magistrate ordered him to begin the questions.

“Which organization do you represent?” asked the man, who turned out to be the town librarian and the only person for miles with decent French.

“If you would only read our letters,” I began, but the magistrate had pulled out an immense collection of handbills and scraps of paper, setting each down on a long table with a bang.

The man had an odd sort of smile, almost a kind of pride, on his face as he displayed his treasures, lovingly collected over what must be years. The librarian was our trembling narrator as the functionary accused us of being at the heart of all his favorite conspiracies: communists, anarchists, spies from various nations, or some sort of unwholesome religious cult designed to draw peasants out of the fields with promises of a better life. We were any and all of these things connected by the obvious degeneracy that my two friends had been practicing in the fields.

These many scrawled slogans in multiple languages were proof that the world was changing under the local authority’s feet, and we were the unlucky ones seen at the crest of this invading tide. My part was by no means a small one, because if what the chemist had tried to allege—that I was caring for two escaped madmen—then I bore the couple’s guilt myself.

It brought me a dark pleasure to see a few of Dr. Zollmer’s signs had made it all the way to this strange moment in a distant land. There was the German writing and a clear ‘Z,’ but these bills also had crude drawings of men in congress. The doctor had no doubt meant to advertise the type of subnormal creatures he was pledged to stamp out, but the official took them to be an advertisement for a group practicing these same perversions.

Holmes was almost in a trance. It was like he used to get mesmerized by his altars of defeat during his attacks of melancholy, but this time I think he was watching his perfect happiness being taken over by an ugliness to which it should be invulnerable. The part of Sherlock Holmes that could always remain in control was suddenly engulfed by the chaos that most of us had felt at least once before.

His lover was stood in the center of the room, surrounded by policemen, clearly at the center of the infraction. But Bruno had retreated into some part of himself where the functionary’s taunts and the periodic strikes could not reach him.

I was the one feeling the outrage that my friends curiously could not, and I was the only one who was being addressed like a person, so I entrusted my arguments in French to the shrinking man who stammered them out again in Hungarian. 

It was the addition of the librarian that made the experience absolutely unbearable. He stood there in his shabby coat and his spectacles, on the verge of tears. He was being asked to translate the filth from the magistrate, and it truly made no sense how we could be all of these threats to public order at once. He was just a normal man, probably with no use for men like us, but not aware enough to have nurtured a real hatred. He had been snatched up into something ugly and senseless, confronted with the worst face of the civic authorities he was condemned to live with, and his disinterested presence pushed us into the realm of the absurd.

For some reason I felt worse for him than my two dear friends, who had both received a few well-placed blows by now.

The magistrate was shouting something over and over to Bruno. I recognized the Hungarian word for priest from the apothecary’s shop.

“Are you a priest?” the magistrate demanded. He evidently couldn’t bring himself to damage the soutane, so he tore at Bruno’s shirt and trousers with every recitation of the question until the garments were in tatters. I couldn’t understand if it would go worse for the unnatural foreigner to say he was a priest or was not. Bruno kept silent, at any rate. Thankfully, Holmes must have understood that any action on his part would make things worse.

“What were you doing in the fields together?” the librarian asked.

“Confessing,” Bruno said with such ardor it made me catch my breath.

And so it went on. Our letters were translated and re-translated from their French by the librarian, and I could understand why it seemed so unlikely that our little party was under the especial protection of the pope. The librarian was made to fill out a telegram form to send to the office right at the heart of the Vatican, where we would surely receive some sort of reply.

As the voice of the group, I began arguing with the stranger about the wording of this telegram, alleging it should be in Latin and thus subject to my exclusive control.

While this was happening, Bruno was receiving more slaps to his head and face and tears to his clothing, until it seemed as though Bruno were the one whose nakedness was asserting itself, and the functionary was shouting for him to stop. I ceased my argument with the librarian, realizing I had thought something similar earlier.

When Bruno stretched out before the altar so long ago in the optimistic portion of the day, I had felt appalled. It wasn’t just a discomfort with religious fervor, however. Bruno was proving to me, to Holmes, to the Vatican that he would continue to be what he was, no matter what people did to divest him, the leopard, of his spots.

He would be a priest and he would love—passionately if inconveniently. He would belong to multiple dissenting groups with conflicting missions and work for contradictory visions of the future church. No matter if we shear him to the skin, his spots would grow back, and it would be up to the rest of us to resolve these contradictions that did him no harm except when he was denied the right to be himself.

The librarian was gazing with me at this calm Italian with the wild hair who was now nearly naked under the soutane that was too holy for the magistrate to profane. I fancied I saw actual spots on his skin. Bruno looked at me and smiled. Of course he smiled. He could remain secure in who he was, but the rest of us in this room, anyone anywhere he went, would be caught up in the alchemical retort where his many changes would always take place. The leopard’s spots change, but he, himself, will always have them—this was the somewhat hallucinatory idea that was running through my mind while the librarian finished the telegram and a policeman ran off to wake the telegraph operator.

The reply was swift.

The Vatican communicated that these three unlikely men were due for an audience with one of their most important offices, and they should be allowed to make this journey without impediment. One Giuseppe Maria Bruno, the man with no papers, would find that border authorities from there to Rome will be expecting to assist his crossing without unnecessary delay.

The magistrate did not seem overly disappointed by the incontrovertible proof that we had friends in very high places. Doubtless he read into the message, as I did, that we would be facing some type of ecclesiastical tribunal. He was like a child who had gotten a glimpse of Father Christmas, and, vindicated by this sight, would continue to have faith in this apparition. Except in this case, the official had caught sight of an evil he’d always believed in, and that belief helped propel his being through the world.

The functionary chewed the ends of his moustaches and everyone began waving their arms, no doubt trying to figure out whether to keep us locked up for the rest of the night until the train could collect us the next day.

As luck would have it, one of the few priests of the Roman rite in the area was visiting someone on their deathbed. The man was hauled in. I recognized him as one Holmes and I had spoken to. The priest had seen the sketch of Bruno and recognized him immediately as the one who fell into a trance and couldn’t be roused for hours. Bruno’s strange manner had immediately recalled the priest to the telegram from Rome warning about such a person.

The magistrate unleashed a torrent of Hungarian at the tired-looking cleric. The priest merely listened and finally said a brief phrase.

“He says he does not know him,” the unlucky librarian translated. Then he relayed another sentence. “He will look after you until the station opens.”

The three of us were too tired to question anything at this point. But after the nightmare was over, I began to wonder.

When we met this old priest, I assumed he’d replied to the Vatican’s message, letting them know where Bruno was, but that telegram never reached us because we found Bruno first. It could be that the man didn’t want to be involved in anything that would delay his return to his bed. But I rather wonder if this stranger had decided the strange case of Bruno was not up to him. He was very kind, so kind after our ordeal that I wanted to catch on to the hem of his cassock and weep.

The priest addressed me in Latin. “You are escorting your friends directly to Rome?”

“Yes I am. It was our promise to bring Bruno to meet with the authorities, and he has consented to go. You can see that he was doing the right thing—he was in the middle of getting fitted for secular clothes.”

Bruno didn’t seem utterly naked because of his hirsute nature. Now that the magistrate had lost his bluster, I wondered how we would get anywhere with only a soutane and little else to clutch over his chest and groin.

The priest followed my gaze. “Would you mind wearing a dead man’s clothes? He was about the same size,” he said to Bruno in Latin.

In a daze, we followed the priest out to the street. It was an undertaker’s carriage that was waiting for him, complete with the deceased inhabitant dressed only in a nightshirt. What were to be his last fine clothes were neatly folded next to him.

“What will this man wear? His family will be disappointed to say goodbye to him without it,” Bruno said.

“You need it more than he does. I have some clothing on hand for this kind of emergency,” the old priest replied. “You’re in luck: I believe these garments are the right size.”

Bruno ripped off the remaining rags and dressed himself there on the street. I think he had turned his back on the idea of shame at some point that night.

The priest held out his hand for the soutane, and after a moment Holmes was the one who took it from Bruno’s arm. It was done very delicately. Bruno looked so small in the dead man’s old-fashioned suit on this foreign street.

It was not prudent for Holmes to touch Bruno to comfort him, but I lay my hand on his shoulder on Sherlock’s behalf. I said, “We should like to leave as soon as possible and prefer not to walk. Do you think your undertaker can carry us to the train station?”

When we had secured the tickets I wired to Rome to spare Bruno the task. In Latin I filled out the form to give our estimated arrival.

“Don’t be so alarmed, doubting Pietro,” Bruno was saying when I rejoined them.   
“Sherlock is not looking forward to my appearance in Rome, but I feel very strong knowing that he will be close. I will be able to show you my home, my friends! What a pleasure to bring you to the Sistine Chapel and all the other wonders that have always been my dwelling place.”

I couldn’t tell if he was putting on a brave face for Holmes or not, but when we boarded the train, our mood lifted quickly. The hideous scene was left behind and we began to enjoy each other’s company with a new bond from what we’d just endured. The two men sat with their legs barely touching and we talked of our visit to Rome as if we were on holiday. It was better than traveling as if we were all under sentence.

I was so glad to see Holmes begin to accept that no matter how cumbersome the Roman justice system turned out to be, Bruno was now traveling in his care and he would be released into his care. The Vatican was unlikely to employ the unpredictable former priest no matter how useful his knowledge might be.

We talked until they dropped off to sleep. My traveling companions bore the bruises from their beatings, and I used my doctorly authority to demand blankets and compresses for both of them. I tucked them in, side by side, and thought I saw one hand close around the other in that small privacy.

During our journey to Italy, Bruno and Holmes came up with various schemes for the relief work that the Italian might like to do in London. He had accepted Holmes’ reasoning that there were plenty of refugees of various sorts in London, and while he could not claim to be a Roman representative any longer, there was no stopping Bruno from imparting spiritual as well as physical support for these unfortunates.

We arrived in Rome with almost all our trepidation left behind us. What followed might be unpleasant, but the papal power was absolute only in a very small terrain, I’d decided, and this I communicated to Bruno. In Holmes’ very competent care from now on, the former priest would at least not have to bear his conflicted feelings for the pope and certain church teachings. He could be himself.

The station was crowded, and I worked to collect our bags while the two men conversed with each other about the Vatican representative who would collect us outside the station. When I turned my back, they were smiling, two harmonious faces amid the general hubbub.

A train was letting out and a surge of people filled the platform. There was a cry and a shout. I turned back to see Bruno being supported by Holmes’ arms and then sliding to the floor with blood dripping out of his trouser leg and his groin.

The detective was shouting out in various languages that the attacker should be apprehended. The crowd began pressing forward and back simultaneously with those curious about what had happened to the curiously dressed gentleman sprawled on the platform and those others not wanting any part of it.

It was done with surgical precision, this single thrust to sever the femoral artery. This I could see with my futile ministrations before the police swarmed on top of us.  Not sure what had taken place, the police contented themselves with wrenching Sherlock Holmes from the Italian who was expiring there on the ground.

Bruno was talking quietly. All I understood was “mi Pietro.”

Holmes was asking again and again if his lover had seen his attacker, in between cursing himself for being too happy to pay attention. He’d failed his Bruno once more by not being the one who noticed everything.

By the time they arranged for the stretcher, Bruno was gone.

 


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Mr. Treacher sponsors a luncheon.

 

Of the next months there is little to tell.  A hard-won love snuffed out, a great man’s prostration—these are elements of Holmes’ life for a more gifted writer to tell. Though I struggled against these huge foes every day, when I think back on that very long period in our shared history, what I mostly think of are the many small inconveniences that I was suddenly charged with handling.

As I had cared for our day-to-day needs throughout our journey, I somehow managed to deal with the practical aspects of Bruno’s death and our way home. In this I was not alone. I saw through this experience the reason why Mrs. Hudson, Church of England, had such a reverence for the Roman church.

There were assorted clergy of high ranks at the station in what seemed like a second after Bruno expired. They used their power of intimidation to encourage the Italian authorities to ask only the most useful questions, and these with great vigor. A manhunt such as the sleepy Italian police had never seen was initiated in the environs of the train station. Bruno was laid to rest as if he were a beloved son welcomed back in the bosom of his family. Holmes and I were both treated with the utmost compassion, seated with the members of Bruno’s distant family who were brought in to make their dazed witness to the end of a complicated life they had scarcely known.

This vast, ancient machinery creaked into place before our eyes, and though Holmes was almost catatonic, I believe the funeral reached him with the message “Everything is as it should be now.” Even my friend’s agony was swept up in the pageant of mourning. Sherlock Holmes stood there in the cemetery next to the gravestones for his parents and his brothers, and he looked like a tree that had just been struck by lightning but was still outwardly perfect, though headed for a fall. He did not weep, He merely let himself be examined by the family and uttered the minimal words to explain who we were and how Bruno had met his end.

That the Vatican would prefer we say little about Bruno’s troubled life was not even voiced, so perfect was our brief understanding. I had no wish to trouble these people who were so splendid during this tragedy. Holmes could scarcely see them.

Of course I thought many times that if Bruno had arrived alive, these same dignitaries would have sanctioned Bruno very severely—perhaps sent him off for silent contemplation for a time. His movements would always be watched, as would any high diplomat who defected, taking his secrets with him.

But in those hallucinatory days I also thought that this enormous funeral—the clergy in their fine robes filled the church and then the cemetery—also meant something that transcended the ugly trial that would have taken place instead. These men—for of course it was almost all men, although with a contingent of sisters and what looked to be housekeepers—had all been touched by Bruno or else they wouldn’t have tried so hard to change him. It was easier to deal with this leopard now that his skin was still, now that his spots could demand nothing of them. If I hadn’t been so concerned about Holmes’ ability to stay upright, I would have wondered at how strange an occasion I was witnessing, there in the heart of the church.

Did it occur to me that these intimidating churchmen could have engineered the death they mourned so beautifully?

Of course.

But my mind was totally preoccupied with getting the detective home before his complete collapse. And I would take any assistance in doing so.

There was a priest at my elbow when it was all over, kindly leading us away from the family and the expectation of some kind of hideous tea, so that Holmes could be put to bed. My Latin prescriptions were fetched in a moment from a pharmacy, and these tinctures helped me bring my dear friend, half-sedated, the rest of the way to London.

Once there, I allowed Holmes to go to several private clinics for a short time, always careful of a private man’s desire to hold his misery close. Each of these annoyed me shortly with how quickly they accepted that this great mind would never piece itself together again.

What with arguing with specialists, and trying to rebuild my own neglected practice so there would be money for this care, I had not a moment to think for some time.

How Sherlock Holmes eventually did get on his feet again is another story. I would like to relate the events that concluded this particular sad chapter dedicated to Bruno.

One day I sent a message to Treacher where I knew he would be poised in his usual table at Pagani’s.

“I’ve been expecting to hear from you, Doctor,” the fixer’s unctuous script said in an immediate reply. “You are most welcome to come on Monday for luncheon. Bring an appetite.”

Simply getting up the nerve to finally send the message had robbed me of any desire for food, so it was not difficult to obey this mysterious directive to fast.

When I arrived, Treacher’s tavern was unusually busy for this time of day. I stood in the doorway, annoyed that I would have to discuss this delicate matter with cooks scurrying around.

“You there, can’t you take the doctor’s coat?” Treacher bawled as he came up from the basement. “If you don’t know how to treat our distinguished guests, how am I supposed to hire you to cook my food?” The little man ushered me into his private office. “I’m so glad you could come to help me decide which of these three contenders is cook for my new restaurant,” he said. “Please, make yourself comfortable. I’ve been wanting to expand from just drinks but it is difficult to decide. We’ll have two English dishes and one Italian.”

I merely stared at the busy tavern-keeper as he called for my favorite drink. “Don’t worry, Doctor. That door’s solid oak. No one will hear our very sensitive conversation with it closed.”

“You know why I’m here,” I stated.

“Of course. I wanted you to come in your own good time,” he smiled. I preferred it when he didn’t.

“I want to know who did it.” I pressed.

“Who murdered your friend? All that’s possible to know is who _did_ it,” he said very precisely.

“Meaning someone else asked them to.” Naturally I had assumed it was a hired assassin as well. Treacher was simply the only one for me to turn with my desire to know more.

I took a sip of my whiskey. “Was it the Vatican?”

Treacher snorted. “Those lot haven’t tried to _do_ something in a thousand years. It’s a miracle that they have people like Bruno all across Europe trying to get some territory back.”

“Do you think the church could do it, or someone from the church?” I asked this prince of the underworld.

“Unlikely,” he said. “They let Bruno get away with a lot, and those ones will have their favorites. They’ll probably make him a saint after his death. Don’t laugh, that’s what they did to the excommunicated Thomas Aquinas.”

There was not enough space in my attention to wonder at the little businessman’s knowledge of the church.

“I think other possibilities are more likely,” he continued. “There’s some who wouldn’t mind a piece of another state right in the middle of Italy, disrupting things, keeping the country focused on domestic matters.”

He leaned back in his chair and grinned. “Surely you must realize, Doctor, thatat this point in time in Europe, anything can happen.”

Then he continued, “But Bruno was the best of them all. Anyone could see that.”  


He paused.

“You mean he was killed to defuse the movement?” I said after a moment. “I would think it was more likely that one of the Vatican’s own took him out.” Once I had gotten away from Rome this possibility seemed the most likely.

“Nah, Doctor, you and I both could see that Bruno was heading for a fall. Why not wait for him to have another fall from grace? The long game is what those Romish types are into.”

I had to admit that this was true. I’d long been hoping for Bruno’s changeable ways to fix on something else, as had Holmes, though he was careful not to let on.

“So if you don’t know who ordered the act, who carried it out?”

“I wouldn’t say the name of such a group aloud,” Treacher said coyly. “There are more like that than you would expect, willing to take on a contract for hire.”

I made an exasperated noise.

“Truly, Doctor, i don’t even know specifically who wielded the knife, although I have two very good ideas. Let’s say I haven’t wanted to know more for fear of letting on to the wrong person what I knew.”

This was unusual prudence coming from him.

“What is known is that a Balkan, possibly a Montenegran, crossed the border into Hungary two days after your arrival there with Mr. Holmes. You were wiring the Vatican along the way to update them, were you not? Someone could have passed that telegram on to someone else. Mr. Holmes always communicates to me in code, but doubtless that wouldn’t have occurred to the clergy.”

I was tensed to hear more.

“Now what is a Montenegran but a swarthy man who could easily hail from another country of swarthy people?” He spread out his small hands. “I won’t venture a guess.”

“You think the Italians contracted—“ I dropped my voice, “someone hoping to remove the driving force behind the statehood movement?”

“That’s one of several possibilities. There were many things that Bruno did that others of his set wouldn’t like.”

A knock came at the door. The first set of dishes was set before us by a stout, red-haired lady. I picked at these traditional pub starters, and then the next. Then a very young man, obviously Italian, came in bearing his food.

“It’s a bit of a risk, deviating from good stout English food,” Treacher said. “This young Angelo is a very promising cook though,” he said, savoring the antipasto such as Bruno had made for me.

“Mmm. Did you get him through Pagani’s?” I asked idly.

My host folded his napkin very carefully. For some reason the hair stood up on the back of my neck

“Nobody knows anything about anyone, except from me. It all goes through me.” The food was stuck to my tongue. “You remember Madame Yvette had this—impressed—upon her after she went in my establishment and told tales about Mr. Holmes and Bruno. Raised a bet even. Scared her within an inch of her life for that. She practically curtsies to me to this day.”

They came to clear the plates and give us the first main course. I ate a polite mouthful or two while still feeling very nervous indeed. It was the only time Mr. Treacher had bared his fangs in front of me, and the enormity of my enlisting him hit me all over again.

“This young Italian cook, whom I know from who knows where, he can know who wielded the knife,” the tavern-keeper said conversationally.

I swallowed hard.  


“Do you want him to tell you?”

I sat there.

“Do you want him to tell me?”

Though I had decided this course after long contemplation, the words were stuck in my throat.

“He’s so young,” I said.

“He doesn’t know he knows, but if I ask him the right questions he’ll be able to tell me.”

The next main course was placed before us.

“I could have equally chosen someone else form his family, if not him. But his mama wanted to come along for this audition at this notorious establishment, and I couldn’t have that. He comes back, says nothing untoward happened, shows this is a business, but not one of my other businesses, and everyone is happy.

The whisky I had been gulping stimulated my heretofore absent appetite, and I was able to swallow a little without the food sticking in my throat. i couldn’t believe i was having a lavish luncheon with someone in the pleasure trade and feeling no prickles of conscience at all.

Actually, at that moment i don’t think there was anyone i could talk to so naturally. I told Treacher so. “Thank you sir. For having me, and speaking with me. I haven’t been able to really talk to anyone since it all happened.” This confidence surprised me, because I had spoken with Dougan and Stanley often about the sad events and Holmes’ illness.

“I went to see Mr. Holmes,” the man said. “I know what you’re contending with. Hard to find decent help.”

“I had forgotten. Yes, they told me you came soon after we returned to London. It was kind of you,” I said, my thanks adding more of a surreal note to that odd meeting. “He’s still very much the same.”

“What a tragedy, that mind gone,” Mr. Treacher said, then he added casually, “I have an idea of something that might help you and Mr. Holmes, Doctor, but that’s a subject for later. Right now, I want you to be sure, but I don’t want the action to be yours. If you choose it, this is mine. My respect for Bruno and Mr. Holmes.”

The dishes were cleared and there was a pause. Treacher yanked on a bell and after a short delay and the young man came in laden with dishes for our Italian main course. I watched this Angelo while trying not to be obvious about it. I memorized his patchy moustache and a birthmark behind his left ear. His apron strings were looped several time around his narrow frame. He paid no attention to me at all because he was falling all over himself to please the tavern owner.

The first dishes he uncovered contained a fried fish. We had already nibbled at two English versions of fried fish, but Treacher and I politely sampled the offering.

“Very light,” he said. “What’s the crust?”

“Semolina, sir,” the boy said, his voice cracking.

Then with a flourish he placed two more dishes in front of us and unlidded them. “Please, sir, try this.”

The little fried fishes did not seem at all tempting. Mr. Treacher took one and chewed it silently. He reached for another and then stopped. “Try one. Do.”

We both selected a little fish. “That’s lovely,” I said after a moment.

“That’s marvelous, is what it is,” the little man declared.

“Anchovies with sage,” the boy said proudly. “I can do an English fish like you asked, but these are special. It was why I was late.”

“I shouldn’t but I will,” Treacher said and we finished off the little delicacies with the beaming chef watching. “Go on with you, boy, you’ll be late for this course as well.”

The cook darted off. We had a fresh drink and in a moment the other two contenders brought in their side dishes one after another. We took forkfuls of each traditional pub recipe, both looking forward to what the Italian would bring. He was only a minute or so late.

“What did I tell you, son, this better have been worth the wait,” Mr. Treacher said in anticipation. The cook unveiled the noodles in a cream sauce.

“You can make it all year round but that cream can come dear,” my host said. “Go on with you then, while the doctor and I consider.”

He let me try it first. “As good a carbonara as Bruno ever made for me,” I said after a moment. “Better.” I took another spoonful of the sauce. “Better.”

Treacher expertly furled his pasta. “Oh,” was all he said for a few minutes. “This boy has the touch. See, you can’t teach a sauce.”

He took another mouthful. “A sauce is like a revelation. It’s like love. Anyone can learn to do a fry-up or cook a vegetable, but a sauce, that you can’t do by rote. But once you see it, that vision is yours, and only yours. He’s done something to this carbonara that others would be hard pressed to imitate.”

We finished our portions and sat back, satisfied. “If you want my opinion, it would be a shame to pass up young talent like this,” I said, lighting a cigarette.

“If I choose the Italian, people will complain. Everything comes at a cost,” Treacher advised me, accepting a cigarette as well.

He pushed for the bell. His porter entered.

“Bring us a digestive, and the three cooks,” he directed.

The drinks were deposited on the table and all the crockery cleared away. Then the three chefs filed in.

All business, Mr. Treacher proceeded to quiz each of them on the cost of their menu, down to the shilling.

When they got to Angelo, the two other cooks snorted at the price he paid for the bacon for the carbonara. “You were robbed, my friend,” Mr. Treacher chortled.

“My butcher has been doing business with my family for generations,” laughed the stout lady.

“My man has named a cut of meat after me; he’d never treat me so ill,” the other man said.

As I watched the exchange, I saw that this was a very carefully planned lesson. The notorious trader in vice wanted to make clear that the post in his kitchens would be run like any other. And no matter who got the post, all three of the contestants would be leaving on good terms.  

“I’ll let you know my decision, presently. A good day to all,” he said, and the cooks filed out.

After months of misery, I felt astoundingly well. I suddenly realized that paradoxically, what the grimy, strange man called Treacher offers is normalcy. Comfort, but not merely of the senses. In this one place—and doubtless his other venues—there was someone who had thought about everything. He anticipated discomforts I didn’t know I had. Not even a church offers such a service, came the blasphemous idea.

We ended up sharing a few more drinks to prolong such pleasant company. At some point I told him:

“I want you to know.”

But that utterance came in the midst of general hilarity about some of the goings on in the tavern. Not even my two caring lovers had been able to make me forget myself like this since the tragedy.

We never spoke about it again. Once I was in the tavern with Dougan and the tavern owner brought out a dish made by the young Italian chef who had already overcome initial misgivings about the foreign fare.

“My treat, gentlemen,” Treacher said.

There was barely a speck hidden in his usual unctuousness.

He didn’t have to say it. The pasta tasted like blood but I ate it as my chosen meal. The deed had been done. I said nothing to either Dougan or Stanley, though I fancied my Slavic friend had some intimation of the events I had set in motion. It was only an inkling.

Years later I came to understand that the entire luncheon was a sham. It was more like a show that Treacher put on for me to have some connection to the person I would eventually ask to set in motion the chain of events that would lead to a man’s death.

I never went out of my way to find the chef Angelo in my visits to Treacher’s, but when I saw him I was always friendly, stopping him for a chat. He was the face of my vengeance. It helped to see it, so that my conscience might never grow dull to what I did.

I never felt any remorse for that decision, but I was glad to have been close to that first pin before it fell. And even when it struck me that it was all a play, I never considered that Treacher had, in fact, done nothing, and merely set up that luncheon to keep me from blundering about and trying to exact retribution.

Mr. Treacher dealt in actualities. He would never offer me ersatz vengeance. That much I trusted completely.

But it is ridiculous that I never once thought how foolish it would have been for Treacher to let me see the person who would eventually find out the identify of Bruno’s killer. His famous discretion would never allow it.

It was years later that I got a good idea of who the real person was who ended Bruno’s life. It wasn’t an Italian—neither a member of the Mafia nor the clergy—I was sure of that.


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Watson finds help in caring for Holmes from several new sources. His friends conspire to give him an evening away from all of his cares.

The dreary weather seemed to go on forever that winter. It was one of those dark seasons when all of London shared a resignation to the elements.

I had been much occupied for over two weeks by a rampant sickness that took the city when it could least resist it. The grippe was raging through the city, and I had no choice but to abandon my friend to his battles of the mind so that I could fight mine against an equally invisible foe. In addition to my surgery, I spent my days doing what little I could at the hospital. When I could get away, utterly exhausted, I decided to look in on Holmes in the latest private facility.

He was gone.

“You had him taken to some clinic in France,” said the attendant. He observed my shocked demeanor. “I thought for sure you knew. Let me find the letter.”

Even before he produced the message with the crab-like penmanship, I had discerned the mark of Mycroft in this.

“’Gone to where he’ll be better cared for’?” I repeated from the terse message. “I would have liked to have some say in that.”

My mind was churning, thinking about what “the best” would mean to this older brother who had never approved of his brother’s sentimental awakening. I imagined that my own interests had reached his ears and he thought they disqualified me from having any say in his brother’s care.

Fuming, I went immediately to the Diogenes Club, sat in a chair with a page in my notebook opened to the word “MYCROFT” and waited for what counted as a silent scream to have an effect on that delicate environment.

There was a rustling of newspapers and a shifting in chairs that counted as seismic among those misanthropes, but twenty minutes later the elder Holmes was produced.

He drew me into the Stranger’s Room, the only place where talking was allowed, and said, “I can’t tell you who was consulting me a few moments ago, but I will say it was a matter of state and not a personal snit, Doctor. You wish I had asked your permission to move my brother.”

“Considering that I was with him at every step of his tragic journey and illness, and that as his friend I have accompanied him on many other---“

Mycroft held up his hand. “You may not always be privy to the same information as I, Doctor, but we can agree on my brother’s need for complete privacy. More complete than the care he has been receiving.”

I nodded tiredly. It worried me to no end to think of Holmes rendered vulnerable and open to anyone who could penetrate the not-excessive security at one of these places.

“I had hoped he would have recovered by now. Never in my darkest imaginings would he have abandoned the world for so long.”

“Quite so,” Mycroft said without emotion. “If this is to be a long convalescence, we have few choices. Send him to a place like Nantes, where we cannot check on him, or keep him out of the public eye in London. My brother, who used to be the soul of discretion, has let such considerations slip more and more in the last few years, and this was with all his faculties at his disposal. There is no telling what he might say or do while in a fit, and the last thing that Sherlock has left is his reputation. Can you guarantee that all the attendants at these London clinics will be discreet?”

Though these were my very concerns, this bloodless Holmes needled me in a private place. “Have you locked him away in some basement to preserve the Holmes’ good family name?”

Mycroft took out his notebook and wrote something. “He will be cared for very competently, and the specialist will take no step without consulting with you. In the future, if you need to contact me urgently, you may do so through my intermediary.” He stalked out.

I was now at the limit of my strength, so I went home with this address that meant nothing to me, forgetting to ask who this intermediary was. When I woke up after a long sleep, the scrap of paper was on my bed table, the address still a mystery, though I soon found from some of our urchins that it was a very humble if not somewhat dangerous little alley. The cab driver took the directions somewhat doubtfully but took me all the same.

The address corresponded to a shabby hatmaker’s. When I inquired within, the proprietor came out and looked me over. “Strictly wholesale,” he barked. “Are you in the trade, Mister—“  


“Doctor, Dr. Watson. And no, I’m not—“

“He’s upstairs,” the man said in a slightly friendlier tone. “Go out the way you came and take the back stairs. It’s at the top.”

I did not relish climbing around on these dangerous stairways that covered the back sides of many tenement buildings, but I was now quite concerned at what this confederate of Mycroft’s would have done with Holmes.

Teetering far above the level of good sense, I rapped on the door.

A lovely young face was scowling at me under the shock of unruly dark hair. “If you mean to try to take him away, you might as well go back to Baker Street,” Mr. Limstock said haughtily.

At least he was kind enough to yank me inside before I stumbled backwards and fell to my death. Of all the people in London, I was not expecting to see the young man whom Holmes had sent with me to try and sniff out spies at the city’s complicit hotels.

I stood there, taking in the attic apartment about the same size, but less airy than the one he had constructed with Bruno. That is perhaps unfair: it was nicer than I would have expected from the outside, and it had a real kitchen, but there was none of the happiness from the artist’s den.

“Why would Mycroft ever choose you as a confederate?” I said when I had found my tongue. “How would you even meet him?”

The young man was taking my coat, stick and hat and then setting a kettle on to boil. Everything from the kitchen to the parlor was sparsely furnished but clean and serviceable.

“Keep your voice down—he’s on a new tincture that helps him sleep a little,” Mr. Limstock said in a low voice. “Old Mycroft’s had people watching Mr. Holmes when he’s not been doing it myself since—since I’ve known the younger Holmes,” he explained. “When I didn’t know Sherlock well I followed him sometimes.”

He blushed, either at using the detective’s first name or at the admission he’d followed him, I couldn’t tell.

“You know, to see what he saw, to look and, well, to look. Sit right there, Doctor, how’s the leg?” He placed a small stool before my injured leg and I gratefully lifted my foot upon it. “See, I pay attention. As I was saying, I was skulking about one night watching Mr. Holmes watch Mr. Treacher’s establishment, when I saw there was someone else watching him! I got concerned, thinking someone was trying to create a scandal about Sherlock, which I no means wanted to happen.”

The waif’s admiration was somewhat endearing, I thought.

“I started following these men—for they were not always the same one, though they were of a type—every chance I got. One evening I saw one getting paid by a portly gentleman and him I traced to some club.”

Mr. Limstock grinned. “It wasn’t hard to work out that he lived right nearby. Let’s just say Mr. Mycroft came back to find a little more than he bargained for in his bed.”

I was speechless over this young man’s resourcefulness, when I had thought that his head was filled only with gossip and Parisian fashion. “What did he say to this invasion?” I couldn’t help but chuckle at this winsome young lad in Mycroft’s bed.

“I said that I’d shriek loud enough to get the whole house up and take him to the police for luring me there with depraved pretenses unless he told me what interest he had in Sherlock Holmes.” A coy smile came across Mr. Limstock’s face. “Who do you think the police would believe?”

We both laughed, remembering when Holmes had put us up to just such a situation in a hotel, and then we faltered at the idea of the wreck of a detective in the bedroom.

The young man got up to prepare us tea. I noted his efficient movements and thought that Holmes could have worse caretakers. “You’ve left your bookkeeping job?” I asked.

“Yes. Mr. Mycroft and I came to an understanding. He’d leave off the surveillance on his brother, which wasn’t very subtle anyway, and I’d answer what questions I saw fit if he asked nicely.”

“You’ve been informing on Holmes? All this time?” My confidence fell.

“No, doctor, I tell his brother some rubbish,” he said kindly. “That’s not what’s important. Mycroft looks me over when he calls me to meet with him, and he makes his calculations with what he sees. Don’t know what happened to him, but he’s like our Mr. Holmes gone all cold inside.“

“How is ‘our’ Mr. Holmes?” I asked, not sure why this young thing thought he had right to such ownership. “You’re certain you can handle him?”

“Quite sure, thank you,” he said primly. “He’s all right. I asked for enough money to keep someone with me at all times, for when he has one of his turns. I’ve a friend in there watching him sleep. We take turns, and this way I can go out for the shopping without fear.”

While I sipped my tea I listened to Mr. Limstock’s observations about our patient. Once more, I had to recognize the boy was far more intelligent than I had originally thought. “Who is to be the specialist?”

“Dr. George Barnett. He’s a friend of Mr. Mycroft’s, or rather, Mycroft has something on him, I expect.” We exchanged a wry smile. “He comes all the way up here nearly every day. He brings the medicines and everything. We’re quite snug here. I only have to go out for food, and that’s the tricky bit, because he won’t eat except from my hand.“

Getting Holmes to eat anything was very difficult, but this must be an exaggeration. “I’d like to see him now.”

We went into the only bedroom. Mr. Limstock professed to sleeping in the parlor where his trunk was pushed to the corner.

A young man was sitting in a chair in the bedroom. I vaguely recognized him as one of the chorus boys I saw in the cafes, usually with older men. “Sleeping very well, Jack,” he whispered to Mr. Limstock and then led us out into the parlor.

“Paul, you know Doctor Watson.”

Evidently he did, because the coquette said, “Hello, Doctor. He’s been quiet. Mumbling to himself, but quiet, you know how he does.”

Indeed I did. One of the most disturbing things about this illness was the way Holmes whispered most of his waking hours. It was scarcely a breath—except for an unnerving laugh, he made no real sound. But this running commentary about some hidden world went on incessantly—one of the reasons why it was difficult to get him to eat.

“You know the secret to feeding him then?” I asked the unlikely attendants. “You have to pretend to eat with him and then take the dish away when he’s done.”

“Yes, we know. Otherwise he’s likely to put a cup of hot tea up to his ear to listen like a seashell. Does the same with books, but he likes to have one or two around.”

We heard a sound from the room and I rushed in.

There was a pile of new mattresses but no bedstead—a safety measure I approved. Atop these lay Sherlock Holmes. He looked at my face searchingly and after I had despaired of any reaction Holmes moved his fingers in front of his eyes. He began uttering syllables in such a low voice that even after these months I strained to hear what he might be saying. But quickly I was forced to recognize that there were no words. Merely the reverberation of thoughts. Probably only half-formed thoughts, at that.

The two young men stepped out while I kept to my custom of talking with Holmes as if he could hear. I still hoped he was in there somewhere, and I owed it to my brilliant friend to give him something to think about.

I spoke of the epidemic and my silent protest at the Diogenes Club. About Dougan and Stanley, and one of the rotating boarders Dougan had set up to help with my share of the rent at Baker Street without any specific association. And every time, though it pained me to do it, I referred to Bruno, though not by name.

“He’d want you to go on, Holmes. It would pain him to no end to see what his absence has wrought in you.”

Feeling glum, as always after these visits, I returned to the parlor. The indefatigable Mr. Limstock had my preferred drink poured.

“Thank you, Mr. Limstock,” I said, sitting down heavily.

“Call me Jack,” he said. “Paul left a little early with you here, but the next shift chap is coming soon. He’s a man of complete confidence, just like Paul. Our sort would never let something happen to Mr. Holmes.”

I sipped my drink. “I must admit I thought the worst when I saw the neighborhood, but you have a marvelous situation here, Jack.” The boy flushed with pleasure. “How you managed to find a flat, furnishings, a specialist and a full complement of attendants is simply miraculous.”

“Well, I had a lot of help from Mr. Treacher,” he said. “It was he who thought of everything, and then I made Mr. Mycroft see things my way. If I feel much better about people believing Sherlock Holmes is in France, then you must as well, Doctor.”

The lad talked a blue streak while I remembered my last meeting with the tavern owner. “I have an idea that might make things easier,” is what he said. My old reflexive irritation at the man infiltrating my life soon died away. Treacher excelled at creating comfort, and I felt tremendously relieved in this snug attic. No hired help would be as attentive as young Jack and his chosen allies.

“I must be getting back,” I said when the next pretty young dancer came in. These boys were stronger than they looked upon close inspection, so they would do. “Could you tell me how I might get in touch with Dr. Barnett?”

“He’s expecting you to call at his office. Come visit us here any time, Doctor. I promise to let you know of any developments.” Jack touched my arm. “We’ll get him better between us. You’ll see.”

With the address in hand, I concentrated on going down the stairs without plummeting to my death.

I sought out Dr. George Barnett soon after. He was an excellent nerve specialist, and we had a very fruitful discussion of Holmes’ condition.

“I’m so relieved to have your help, Dr. Barnett,” I confessed. “Most people don’t even want to try to help Holmes at this point. They’ve given up.”

“I plan on calling at least three times a week, and please contact me in the case of an emergency,” Barnett said. “My treatments are exactly calibrated and the last thing we need is someone blundering in with morphine or some other stupefacient.”

After I took my leave, I realized what was bothering me about the conversation. Barnett didn’t say why he was willing to make such efforts. The case of a genius who’d lost his senses would be enough to lure many medical men. But this one was very distant.

I could only think that it wasn’t Mycroft who “had something on the doctor,” as Jack said. This was another of Treacher’s “fixes.” This man must have done something very compromising to agree to travel to that vile neighborhood several times a week.

My new sense of morality told me that such a person would be discretion itself, and left it at that.

The next time I popped by, Mr. Limstock came to the door without his shoes. He caught my sidelong glance, doubtless seeing that I remembered his assertion that he would never uncover his deformity before any man.

“Mr. Holmes doesn’t mind them,” he said defiantly. “Matter of fact, he says they stimulate his intellect.”

“Mr. Holmes?  He’s talking?”

“See for yourself. I was going to send out the morning shift man with a message to you when he left.”

Nearly ever surface of the bedroom was covered with papers. Previously, the detective had been allowed to use a blunt crayon to entertain himself, but abruptly these scribbles had exploded into comprehensible writing.

We stood in the doorway and watched. It was as though someone had found a hidden mechanism controlling the volume on a phonograph. What we heard is what Holmes had been muttering under his breath.

Most of it was a very rapid monologue about what might have been scientific subjects. If this speech would have made any sense at a slower rate, I am not sure. Occasionally his eyes would cross ours or he would thrust a paper at us, but I didn’t feel he was much more able to connect with us than he was in his previous state.

David, the young man watching him, was saying to me, “It was the strangest thing, Doctor. He woke up like usual and stood up to pace. It took me some time to realize he was actually writing words. I think this must be a good sign!”

It was somewhat less than a complete recovery, but it was something. “Thank you, both of you. I’ll sit a little while with him, if you don’t mind.”

The boys left me to listen to the incomprehensible words for some time. Thus we settled into a new pattern. Dr. Barnett, for one, showed the first real enthusiasm for his charge after this development.

It was thanks to Jack Limstock and the Treacher-supplied doctor that I was able to go to Dougan’s new play a few weeks after that.

I have a feeling that no matter how my patient was doing, Mackie would have absconded with my person to ensure my attendance. He had been working very hard on this debut, was all that got through my haze of cares. I did know that with everyone other than me he was exceptionally ill-tempered during its gestation. Once, one of his actors came to see me at Baker Street—a very unusual meeting of my two worlds—to beg me to attend at least a few rehearsals.

“We need you to interpret for us like you used to, Doctor,” the leading man said. “Mackie’s absolutely impossible, never saying what he wants and then flying into a rage if you don’t divine what he wants. I know you have many cares, but you have a calming effect on him. He misses you, John.”

This touched me and also made me feel guilty, because in our meetings now I was mostly seeking a desperate comfort from Dougan, as I did from Stanley. I assured my visitor I would make and effort and then went back to my frenetic schedule of the surgery and trying to coax intelligent speech out of Sherlock Holmes.

The morning before the event, Mr. Limstock confronted me. “Do you know what day it is?”

“Er, Thursday?” I answered, my mind on that day’s appointments.

“Exactly.” He waited for a reaction that didn’t come. “Tomorrow is the premier of Mr. MacLeod’s new play. You will attend.” I nodded absently to the directive. “He’s sending you a carriage to collect you, so be dressed in your finest. You would never treat him so ill as to forget.”

“I had totally forgotten,” I admitted. “When will the carriage arrive?”

I rearranged my appointments to have the next afternoon free, and was ready at the time Dougan had indicated. My original thought was that my friend had sent the carriage to make sure I actually came, and then Mrs. Hudson came to advise me that a dignitary was about to alight at our door.

“Never fear. A friend from the theater has sent a carriage,” I told her. I looked out the window and saw the fine vehicle drawn by two, with a driver wearing livery sitting on top. “Or perhaps not,” I said in surprise.

In my humble finery I went down to investigate. As far as Mrs. Hudson and the collection of urchins knew, I disappeared into the rich, dark interior and then poked my head out a moment later.

What really happened was the door opened slightly and I entered into the dim, curtained interior to ask “Hello, sir, are you here for a detective or a doctor?”

The man leaned into the light, his top hat and elegant evening attire complemented by a mask. Holmes and I had only one client so exalted that he required a mask to hide his lofty origins. This I was thinking when the man said in a thick accent but excellent diction, “I was told I could procure other services at this address.” His lips revealed not a smile, but his eyes burned with passion behind the mask.

I got in the rest of the way, only pausing to lean out and say, “A case requires my urgent attention, Mrs. Hudson, never fear.” It seemed the best way to explain this unexpected visitor, as I still didn’t understand why the inhabitant of the carriage was an elegantly dressed Stanley.

It was Stanley, but not Stanley. For he took off his mask soon enough but something was utterly changed in this man I knew intimately.

He’d had one big paw against my back since I entered the compartment, and everything about his touch and appearance was unexpectedly commanding. He rapped on the wood and the driver set us in motion.

“Stanley, I’m very glad to see you, but what—“

He caught me roughly in his arms and silenced me with a kiss I felt down to my toes, which suddenly felt very shabby. My own evening best did not extend to more than one suit, and neither, I had thought, did Stanley’s. Nevertheless, he was wearing some confection that made him look more foreign and yet more elegant by English standards than usual. He was sleek and sensual, as if the clothes told more about the beauty underneath than they usually did. This striking man had a green velvet cravat and a starched collar—two articles of clothing he avoided—and his boots were marvels of leather that reached high up his calf. A long white silk scarf hung on top of his coat. He had a signet ring on his smallest finger.

He looked like a prince.

“The driver will not arrive at the theater until I tell him to.”

At that tantalizing piece of news, Stanley took my hand and kissed it. Unlike the first time he did so, I understood the courtly gesture. I quivered somewhere inside, and he noticed.

Then my friend smiled a little more like himself. “Dougan had the idea that you could use some diversion. He selected my clothing, and told me my part to play I asked an old chauffer friend of mine to drive us. He knows I work in the theater and thinks I am playing the part of a nobleman for some prank.”

“But Stanley,” I said, touching his perfect starched cuffs. “If I were to wear this it would be a costume. You’ve become someone else. Does your friend the driver know about you?”

“No one but you, and our mutual friend the director who has been so generous to me. I will give you everything tonight. Everything that I have.” He kissed me on the mouth and I gave in to his arms.  

Strangely overwhelmed, I sat there and listened to the kind of stories he never told me. I knew all about the people who raised him and his country habits, his love of horses and favorite music teacher. But on this long drive to the theater he told me gossip about the nobility in Bohemia and elsewhere, telling me about their tortuous blood relations and affairs never spoken about outside of court. After we had two glasses of champagne (Dougan had thought of everything) and I was hanging on his every word, the horses slowed.

“I tell my friend to take a longer route so I have time with you before the curtain,” the Slav said, stroking my back. “Did he tell you I must play the violin many times throughout the play, and I can’t sit with you?”

Did Dougan mention it? I had been so preoccupied with Holmes’ illness that my two theatrical friends’ activities sort of ran together. I must have looked disappointed because he drew me bodily to him. “Wait until afterwards and then I will draw music from you.”

The driver came to the door and Stanley gave me a push so that I was not lolling too close when the door opened and the theater crowds became visible. I got out and felt somewhat disoriented by the crowds of well-dressed people walking towards their diversions.

When I looked back, Stanley dashing towards the backstage entrance. I did catch a few people in the throngs watching him, no doubt wondering why a gentleman was entering like a stage-hand. It must be the hat. I’d never seen Stanley in a hat, no matter what the weather, but he looked like a different man wearing one with the sort of good breeding that takes generations.

When I went to the seat Dougan had procured for me near the front and center, I didn’t see Stanley sitting in the orchestra pit with the other musicians. As far as I knew he only would play from the wings, so that is what must be what was happening this time.

The lights lowered and the first haunting strains of a violin were heard from some unexpected place, not the wings. Along with everyone else I gasped. This master violinist must be playing above us, from the flies. I had always loved Stanley since the first time we were together and perhaps before, but now I felt my heart about to break for desire of him.

The first scene was of a man and a woman dancing, both wearing formal attire. Only when we heard a noise did they spring apart and she act like she was arranging the flowers. That his clothing is a servant’s livery, and not a gentleman’s suit, was now apparent. He went out but came back in again with a tureen of soup as the other guests filed in.

Dougan’s magic drew me into the spectacle. It only took me a moment to realize that the heroine, Doreen, was the character based on Holmes. No one else would ever have made the connection except Stanley, who was playing a musical commentary from above us. The stagehand had also watched the Sherlock who whirled around in the arms of his smoldering dance partner. Mackie had not been there on that occasion, though I had told him about it, but somehow he managed to translate that supple, willowy quality of a Sherlock Holmes who would be or do anything for his great love, into every movement they made together.

Later, the authorities would try to make trouble for this play, saying that it was indecent, but though people argued about it, nobody could pinpoint why. Most of the time Doreen was separated from Liam, the footman she loved, by social expectations and a whole formal table service. When he poured her wine or offered her the sauce, the two actors managed to make the “yes” and “miss” resound on the stage and the overflowing of a saucer to be the most sexual thing seen on stage in years.

Doreen was the youngest daughter of four, her other sisters already married in good matches. Our heroine’s mother was now an invalid and the supervision of her care fell to the one daughter still at home. What tore the girl apart was that she was not only concerned about her mother’s comfort, but with avoiding marriage. She was in love with her servant, whom she saw for fleeting moments during the course of their humdrum existence.

 

There was scarcely any dialogue other than the sort of dinner party conversation that went on forever. We saw minute changes in the sisters and the slow degeneration of the mother’s health was commented upon. But Doreen was always the same, and wearing the same gown with small changes in accessories.

Against that emptiness their frustrated love was almost painful to watch. Doreen and Liam had arguments with almost no words at all, fighting over how they would resolve their predicament while right in front of others. He wished to be able to provide for her, but all she feared for was his ability to go on with ta harsh dismissal. For her domineering father would no doubt ruin Liam’s reputation, should they be found out.

The scene changes were accomplished by the very servants in the play, including Liam. Somehow, Dougan had arranged these commonplaces so that he had the audience at the edge of their seats, making little noises of warning to let Doreen know not to run off with her paramour after her mother’s death.

With her excuses gone, we sawthe father parade a few pretenders before her. Doreen was terrified at being married off, which would mean being sent away from the estate where Liam had his post.

She came up with a desperate plan. Doreen had gotten a hold of some jewels that really should be hers but another relative had refused to recognize the fact. The guests were commenting upon the supposed theft over dinner, which was, as usual, served by Liam.

They planned to run away together later that night.

Mackie had heard all about our disaster in the East, and I had repeated the scene where Bruno was violently stripped by the magistrate. Obviously, a player could not be denuded in front of an audience, but when the latest husband candidate caught Doreen leaving a room and then Liam leaving soon after, he told the father.

The actor playing the father had splendid moustaches and he chewed them with great delectation while he was tearing the footman’s serving-coat. He went to Doreen’s room and found her bags packed along with one of his. Though the jewels were found in this luggage, the father refused to consider that the girl had a hand in putting them there.

“You betray my trust, corrupt my daughter, steal the jewels and then think you will steal away with her in the night?” he roared.

What the audience saw was a man being stripped of his profession, never to get a job in a decent house again. But what they felt was a man standing calm and naked before the person who would destroy his happiness.

No doubt because he feared she was tainted by scandal, Doreen’s father gave his blessing for a quick marriage to the candidate who had been desperate to win the girl’s attention for some time, and who had frustrated her escape from the house.

Liam was given time to pack his things. Unable to reconcile himself to the woman he loved, but had scarcely touched, being given bodily to this stranger, the footman returned from the scullery with a knife and tried to run the fiancé through with it.

No doubt wishing to prevent her lover from a prison sentence, Doreen tried to intervene.

The knife slashed at her neck, and she soon expired in a pool of blood. Liam was restrained by the gentlemen, who turned the raving man over to the police.

The curtain stayed up for some minutes, showing the servants cleaning the scenery of blood.

At some point we saw through the window the bridal bier carried aloft a miserable Doreen suffocating in lace. Mackie had obviously remembered my telling of Bruno’s splendid funeral, and the way his casket had been borne in great pomp to the cemetery. He reversed everything, just as he said was possible on our first meeting, but the story of the two lovers who had been Holmes and Bruno was there on the stage.

Only then, with the puddle of red ink being mopped up in silence, did I really understand that Bruno was dead and Holmes perhaps forever insane. I think I did not fully understand what we all lost on our sojourn to the east until Dougan reflected it for me in the artifice of the theater. Neither the detective nor I had been able to mourn. This love story had no space in which to blaze and then sputter out and become a scar either of us could wear publicly.

I thought back to our first conversation about whether truth could survive on the stage. My Mackie had made it live. The rest of the spectators didn’t even know what truth had been painstakingly distilled for my eyes, but they felt something important happening. A sort of justice that had been missing was enacted. They gasped at the right times and it was one of the most vocal audiences I had ever heard.

In this story, Doreen was killed. Liam was the one confined howling to a prison, where he was allowed only a leather garment strapped to him so that he couldn’t hang himself with it. In actuality, Holmes was restricted to a room with only a crayon and a mattress—the rough equivalent for a genius. This reversal felt so right, though. The eternally unquiet Bruno might have his own task trying to make peace with Holmes’ illness if he could see this degeneration from the beyond, but I had lost my closest friend to madness. I sobbed when we saw Liam dancing with empty arms forever.

When the curtain went down and then came up on the two main characters sitting at a small but cheerful kitchen table, such as they must have imagined for themselves, the actors got up and took their bow after the other characters. There was a long roar of applause.

Suddenly, a bright light shone on the rafters, revealing Stanley. He was still elegantly dressed, though minus the hat, and his wheat-colored hair done up in a ribbon shone in the light, as did his ring. He bowed with his violin and infinite good breeding before the applause for the essential contribution he made to the play. For it became clear that the violin had been Liam’s memory commenting upon the events that were engraved in his mind, looking upon them with the mercy attained on the other side of death and imprisonment.

My shy friend had acted in a play.

I was so proud of Stanley for attaining his great dream and then taking a public bow. When the lights went up and people began filing out, I was pushed out into the lobby with the rest.

Dougan was receiving the crowd’s handshakes of congratulations. He greeted me in a polite tone, but with a mischievous quiver of his lip.

“It was splendid, Mackie, you made the truth survive the footlights,” I stammered.

“I’m so glad you approve, my John, but I think there is another player who deserves congratulations.”

Stanley had loomed up behind us in his top hat.

“Have a wonderful night,” Dougan said, and then whispered into my ear, “I can’t wait to hear all about it.”

Stanley helped me navigate through the crowd. “You were marvelous, Stanley.  As if you hadn’t started the evening like a true actor, you and your violin were another character in the play.”

“You think so?” His face was shining and he was unusually animated. “Dougan has a picnic ready for us in the carriage. We will take it to my boat, eat and then we will drink like Cossacks.”

We attained the carriage and I scarcely got the door closed before becoming the lucky recipient all of Stanley’s excitement. He was talking in his native tongue during this outpouring of passion that was unusual even for him. I myself had never done such a thing in a carriage, and so while I did not know what he was saying, I was also quickened by the experience.

It was only the beginning of a transformative night together.

 

 


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Holmes solves the mystery of his own death, while Stanley and Watson discover a future together.

Stanley rowed us over to his boat and ceremoniously brought me aboard, and then the picnic. Dougan had loaded us down with a real feast, so we broke our usual habit of alighting some distance away from where he accessed the canal.

He served me with great gentility and we ate the smoked meats, fine cheeses and fruits with more drink and a particular kind of bread that Stanley favored. Dougan thought of everything.

All the while Stanley was talking. “I come to London wanting to do just this, to perform,”he said. “I feel very good, John. Maybe next time I will try to play in the orchestra with the others. If I could endure everyone looking at me, I could take a small part, a waiter or a butler, someone who doesn’t speak.”

“From what I have seen of you tonight, you could do many things,”I said fondly, accepting the bit of pear he placed in my mouth. “You were this commanding presence in the theater lobby as well. I saw what you did with Adam Fairlie. He was shooting his usual daggers at me with his eyes, and you cowed him with just a look. And Adam always has to be the master of any situation.”

The moment with Dougan’s official lover had been short but significant. Stanley was always easygoing when we crossed paths with Dougan and Adam, no doubt because he had a great respect for the impresario.

This night, Stanley was haughtily dismissive. “Fairlie? A weakling at heart like all bullies. I endeavor not to heed his presence if I can help it.  But tonight, I do not wish him to spoil your evening away from all cares.”

He got up and fetched a pen along with some papers from his coat. “So you will always remember tonight.”

They were playbills from the show. He wrote on both and presented them to me with a bow. On one he had written “Violinist”along with his entire long royal name. The other he wrote “Violinist: Stanley.”

With this gift I began to understand how many things had come together that night for my lover. His hidden past and his present, his desire to act and some natural authority I’d not glimpsed before.

“Come,”he said with a voice that would be obeyed. My hand disappeared in his and he led me the short distance to the bed. We might as well have crossed over into another world.

“Be mine,”he said with his new confidence.

He laid me on the bed. Stanley began arranging my body for our pleasure. While he removed my clothing I had the unusual sensation that he was removing all my doubts. Up until now I had thought it was my allegiance to Dougan that had me keeping some small part of myself from total surrender to this love that would never demand anything.

Now I saw that it was merely fear. Fear of giving myself completely to someone who was ready to do the same to me. Mackie would only wish for me to follow my heart and tell him about it at some point. Our link was established. That night my passion for this beautiful man finally overran my internal dams.

“Make me yours,”I whispered, my hands already doing their part to make him mine.

It would seem there would be no more to be said, because our bodies attained some type of transcendent state where nothing was lacking except the need to experience it again and again.

But we talked during much of it. At points we talked a great deal. Stanley often lapsed into his mother tongue that needed no translation because I felt what he was saying to me deep in my heart. Me, I was overrun with plans about the new future I could now envision for us.

“Let’s go away, Stanley,”I gasped into his hot ear. “You have the means to do anything, and there is only sorrow for me in London now. I can show you India! You’ve always wanted to go. Or we could go someplace else. Perhaps someplace like Morocco, where we wouldn’t have to hide so much. Or else we could take turns playing at being each other’s manservants from city to city. You’ve proven you are a performer.”

Stanley stopped what he was doing. I was afraid he was offended at my mentioning the fortune he never touched, slowly growing in a bank somewhere.

“You would do this with me?”he asked, his eyes glistening. “I never think of this day. Or I do, but I think I am mad.”

We joined with such congruence that we said nothing except the everything that is love.

It was a sacrament. what we achieved, two retiring men together. So many years of fumbling, and then together realizing that we were at last free of the meanness of life and our own clumsiness. With each movement, we were building something. The idea that what we had long known in private might be brought into the world and change the rules, even if only slightly, blazed around us. I had never thought fleeting pleasure could leave a permanent mark.

“I want to be stupidly happy with you,”Stanley said with a gloating look at my spent satisfaction twined in his arms.

“Mackie will be looking forward to our letters from the moment I tell him,”I replied.

“What sort of things do you plan on telling him?”Stanley nuzzled in my neck.

“Everything. I plan on having such purple tales that we shall have to concoct a cipher to safely post them,”I confided.

Our long night was promising one more bis when we heard the shouting.

My host rushed around, throwing my own clothes at me while struggling into trousers and  one of his regular peasant blouses before throwing his evening jacket over.

As the more undone and less agile one, it took me longer to dress. The whole time I was struggling to tell myself that what had sounded like a domestic dispute from a neighboring boat was coming towards us to end our wonderful night.

“Hulloa! Hulloa!”Someone was shouting over the sound of a boat that was approaching. Since it was not unheard of for boats to move around at night, particularly those delivering fuel to the canal inhabitants, these maritime sounds became background noise, a picturesque tableau that made Stanley’s floating refuge so charming. But as a permanent resident, he must have been alerted before I by the sound of a craft coming our way. Or by the shouting, which was not usual at night from boat to boat.

“Hulloa!”“Doctor, Hulloa!”“Doctor!”The addition of my title had me even more surprised, and I had myself dressed by the time Stanley shouted back, “Hh-here!”     

I popped my head out to see who could possibly be calling for my services away from shore. When I saw—the indefatigable Mr. Limstock, very much in charge of the boat he had induced to carry him to Stanley’s floating home. With my most professional face on, I was cursing him internally for raising such a fuss across the water, for now many people were craning out of their boats to see who was visiting the silent Slav.

Mr. Limstock’s grimly set mouth twitched when he darted a glance at my feet and Stanley’s, neither of us wearing shoes.

“Hhhe—ii--iis ver--very ss-ick?”Stanley asked, the return of his impediment snapping me back into my medical mode.

“I am sorry to bother you,”Mr. Limstock said, as if he cared not a whit about anyone’s bother, “but your patient is doing poorly.”

I skittered on bare feet inside the boat and Stanley laced one boot while I did the other. I drew him up by his undone hair. “We’ll make our plans soon, my man.”

He drew me up off the floor with such force that my feet left the ground while he kissed me. “My Jon, don’t call me that unless you want me to prove it to be true.”

It ached to separate from him, but he pushed me ahead. My social mask in place, I strode outside. “I don’t have my bag. I was at the theater this evening.”

“it was a nice evening, I trust.”

Mr. Limstock was using those clever eyes to construct his own version of my magical evening. A little of the princely Stanley returned as my friend loomed over the slim young thing. Jack cast his eyes downwards.

“Th-th-thank you for the-the-el-el-el-eloc—eloc—u--tion—les-lesson, doc-tor.”My love bowed formally.

Since this is the way Stanley talked with everyone but me, our torrid evening became our private affair, and I was brought over to the larger and faster boat where Mr. Limstock was standing, completely himself among the canal family whose boat he had commandeered. I willed myself not to look back at Stanley, whom I felt watching from his boat.

The boat operators talked for a few moments about the best street for us to be let off, I suppose, while I was only thinking about what possible tragedy could have befallen Holmes where he was. Only then did Mr. Limstock regard my worry. “We’ll be at the hospital before you know it.”

Dougan’s play came rushing back. What if Holmes, really died, as Doreen did in the play? “But will it be in time?” I demanded. “What did he do to himself? How could you let something happen?”

“I don’t know, Doctor. I can’t understand it. His room is a few mattresses and nothing else. We only let him have one crayon at a time.” His voice was so pleading I relented.

“It’s all right, Jack. He might merely be ill. He’s had some stomach upset and periods of lethargy since he’s been taking Dr. Barnett’s remedies, but they’ve helped somewhat so it seemed a good trade.”

I launched into a torrent of technical medical questions that of course the lad couldn’t answer, but which at least served to distract the rest of me that was overwhelmed with concern over our mutual friend.

My learned speech must have impressed our hosts, and they transported us to the point on the shore indicated by my companion, their faces serious.

By the time we came ashore, I had taken refuge in my doctorly persona, which does not indulge in sentiment. Mr. Limstock gave a liberal tip to the boat owners, who wished my patient well.

I scarcely heard them, nor paid attention to the young man giving directions to the cab driver he had cannily enough located after a short walk. We rode in silence until we approached the hospital gates. I didn’t even wait for Mr. Limstock to pay the driver or to make his way through the sentry.

As a doctor I knew my way into all of London’s hospitals well enough, and the sentry either recognized me or my purposeful gait, while the winsome Mr. Limstock was left to argue his right to be let in at that hour. After less than two minutes that felt like an age, I was standing in the doorway of the room indicated. The attending nurse looked up in annoyance and then must have recognized me.

She drew me out into the hallway and said, “I’m so glad it’s you, Dr. Watson. We can’t figure out what he’s done to himself, only that he’s nearly died doing it.”

She let me come to his bedside. His eyes were closed but he was still weakly trying to keep up that incessant murmur that was the mark of his madness. Over the course of his illness, Holmes had gone from sinewy to gaunt, but now it was as though those very sinews had been unraveled in some secret place. It was the look of frailty that needed but one more knot undone to reach death.

He smelled ill, what I knew to be the secretion of a body that had switched tracks to follow some unnatural end. I had noted the signs it many times, either in the old or those who had a sudden, severe fever that could halt the breath and stop the heart without anyone ever understanding what secret commerce had allowed them to do so.

“There’s not a mark on him,” the nurse said as I picked up the slack, swollen hand that now seemed devoid of all wisdom, that had never played a violin at three in the morning or detected a forgery by sliding across a painting.

My hand touched the sheet and found it drenched. Holmes’ tongue darted out to try and catch the saliva leaking out of his mouth and then he bent forward to retch before we could place the basin.

“Oh dear,” the nurse said as I helped her to change the sheets. Or I started to, before I stood still.

“That’s all right, I can manage. He’s in a messy way, and not keeping nutrition always bodes ill,” she began.

“Is it just me or is his tongue an odd color?” I asked, prizing Holmes’ teeth open. His tongue seemed to look odd, but I couldn’t pinpoint why. My friend had been known to put many things in his mouth. Inattention to this habit was the cause for my removing him from one of his clinics.

Mr. Limstock was as vigilant as could be, however, and I only knew about the occasional crayon being gnawed on. I’d seen Jack going over his helpers looking for potentially dangerous items before they were allowed in with Holmes.

“Dr. Stanbury, at your service,” said the doctor who had come up behind me. “Do you know what ails Mr. Holmes?”

“It’s as I feared,” I said grimly. “He’s found a way to do himself in, though how he obtained poison is beyond me. He’s watched constantly.”

“We didn’t find any puncture marks, so it couldn’t be a drug he administered to himself that way. I thought he might have some type of cancer. It would explain the wasting symptoms, though I can’t palpate his abdomen well enough to look for marks. I get near his stomach and he vomits. See if you can manage it.”

I murmured soothing phrases and once, was rewarded by the eyes flying open and wheeling around in their sockets. My hands were under the bedclothes and had barely touched his belly before Holmes flailed and vomited. The nurse was ready for him.

“Do you smell that?” I asked, in the way practitioners can be frank about such things.

“He had something aromatic for dinner,” Stanbury said. “He was brought here from a neighborhood full of immigrants. The ambulance drivers were scared for their lives when the alarm was raised. Who knows what kind of unwholesome stuff he’d been living off of in that nest of tenements.”

“I thought the same. It could only be a thin soup or broth,” the nurse added. “Though I think it would be gone by now.”

“He has had no such thing,” a furious Mr. Limstock said, extricating himself from the orderly who I suspect had been dragged all the way to the room. “Mashed potatoes with a little chicken mixed in. The same went into my meal, and you can see I am quite well.”

“This is Mr. Holmes’ hired carer,” I said firmly. “Mr. Limstock has been providing impeccable assistance, which is why I am so confounded by how a very ill detective who never left the flat could have acquired arsenic.”

“Of course, the garlic smell on his breath,” Stanbury said, springing into action. “Call for some assistance, matron, and some charcoal. If you could help control the patient’s hands I’d like to rule out an abdominal mass.”

While we fought with Holmes, the other doctor remarked casually, “Can you be sure this isn’t from the patent medicines that George Barnett has been feeding him?”

Mr. Limstock and I both flinched. “He told you Mr. Holmes was in the city?” The lad asked.

“I knew nothing of the detective’s whereabouts until he surfaced in that vile neighborhood. I saw Barnett’s hand when I saw the bottles and the note that accompanied the patient. Your doing, I suppose,” Dr. Stanbury said to the young man who was having a more calming effect on Holmes than either of us. The detective’s hand clung to Jack’s while his body tried to retch once more.

“Yes, sir, Mr. Barnett was most insistent his treatments should be respected. I hope he comes presently,” Mr. Limstock said.

“Hyoscyamine? Digitalis? One treats stomach ailments and the other causes them,” Stanbury said with scorn. “Though Barnett has been saying for years that they will calm specific types of nervous excitation. I’ve sent word to Dr. Barnett myself to hear exactly how much he’d prescribed and ascertain that this sad pass wasn’t caused by these dubious treatments.”

The doctor watched the realization that it was all too possible dawn on my face. “His heart rate?” I inquired.

“Neither too fast or too slow,” he supplied. “I had thought it wasn’t a serious overdose and I could give Barnett a good talking-to for endangering a patient.”

“What has your outmoded doctoring done to Mr. Holmes?” Barnett demanded from the doorway.

The two men began arguing. Young Jack watched the matron wiping the detective’s mouth, and the look of anguish on his face reminded me of exactly how young he was. Here was his idol and the patient he had nursed for months lying moribund in the bed.

I pushed him out into the hall. ”You’ve done everything right. Let’s let the doctors do their work.”

“He couldn’t have gotten any arsenic. I’ve been so careful,” my young companion sobbed.

“Somewhere in that brain are more secret ways of inducing death than exist in the rest of Britain,”I assured him. “Let’s return to the flat and see if we can’t piece it together.”

It was too painful to say aloud that there was very little to do for Holmes, and I’d rather spare the boy from watching any more of his hero’s suffering.

We found a carriage and I confess to nodding off on the way there. My friend jostled me awake.

“So you didn’t get any sleep, I take it,” said the charming lad with a curl to his lip. “I shouldn’t, had I the chance to teach that one elocution.”

He drew out the word sensually.

My enchanting night would not be profaned by this little coquette. “I don’t know about you, but my only concern at the moment is that you teach me every aspect of your daily life, and especially what you know about your hired help.”

“None of the boys would give Sherlock poison!” he protested.

Over the next day and a half I was able to determine this for myself. I’m afraid that Jack rousted every chorus boy, theater apprentice and dancer from the most varied haunts. They all vehemently denied being enlisted to hasten the great detective’s demise or knowing anything about arsenic.

“You see? I know who can be trusted to care for Sherlock,” Mr. Limstock said.

“If you trusted them so much, why did you have so many assistants?” I asked, feeling quite exhausted after so many interviews in the attic flat.

“I didn’t want anyone getting any ideas,” the lad admitted. “Here, Doctor, you put up your leg and have a nap while I make us some dinner.”

The resourceful Mr. Limstock’s skills included cooking, but the last many hours had stolen my appetite. I was awoken to eat a little and then dozed on the couch. Jack had made up a pallet on the floor nearby, if he slept at all. He had an iron constitution, and arranged for messages to be sent to Stanley, Dougan and Mycroft, (and Mr. Treacher as well, I suspected) apprising them of what we found on our next visit to the hospital: Sherlock Holmes still lived.

I must admit that Jack stayed longer than I did. My shock had come over me more slowly than my young friend’s, and it made me want to sit in Holmes’ antiseptic room and consider: Did we deprive him of too much, keeping him locked in here? I read to him when I could, and Jack said he did the same. The boys who could sing would sing. There was an artist chap who would draw with Holmes. What could we have done differently to make him want to stay on this earth?

For the how concerned me not so much after a while. Holmes would manage to die if he was determined to—I had never doubted that. But I wished so much that there was something worth living for, even with the gaping absence of Bruno. But his closest friends had not been enough.

That night I lay back in his room and thought of better days—the many cases we’d solved. Even the arguments and danger seemed precious. My memories seemed to match the wallpaper of a cheerful blue, the only artistic touch that could be added to the patient’s prison. The entire flat had been redone by the attentive Mr. Treacher before Holmes was brought here.

The little businessman had told me himself on one of the occasions Mackie brought me out for enforced time off. The attic had lain empty for years, which may have been a blessing. Old plumbing was due to be replaced, floorboards rewaxed. The stove was new. The icebox was of the latest design. Whether it mattered to him or not, my dear friend had been living much better than his poor neighbors.

There were noises I’d never heeded from the neighboring buildings that all clustered together around a courtyard. Holmes’ flat was the top level of a narrow building that housed the several floors of the hatmaking factory that went quiet at night. In that silence the noises of the adjacent lives and the smells of their cooking seemed to amplify at night. I wondered if these people had miseries greater than this room had seen, and how they managed to survive them.

Finally, I must have slept.

“There now, Doctor, you can’t sit in here mooning about,” Mr. Limstock said in the doorway.

“Forgive me. These sad months have taken their toll on me. I’ll come to the hospital presently. It’s Mr. Holmes?” I could only think that his last moments were approaching.

Jack pulled me up out of the bed. “Mr. Holmes said you must come at once. For me to carry you out of this place if I must.”

“Holmes said? He’s awake?” I stood there stupidly for some moments until Jack propelled me out of the room.

“He insists upon revealing the mystery of his almost-death, and he says we must come as quickly as possible.” Jack equipped me with my coat, hat and stick and pushed me out onto the landing.

“I really am out of form. Those stairs get worse and worse,” I complained at the bottom of the stairs.

“Perhaps,” was the only answer I received on the cab ride to the hospital. I was overjoyed at being able to talk to a sensible Sherlock Holmes for the first time in so ages, so much so that I didn’t pay attention to my young companion’s unusual silence.

The detective looked physically the same, but everything was changed by those intelligent eyes in place once again.

“Come closer, Watson, my voice is not yet recovered,” he whispered. “You sit there, and my loyal Jack, there.” A weak hand reached for the lad’s sleeve and kept a few fingers on the cloth.

“First of all, I want you both to know that I did not initiate my own death.” Mr. Limstock’s face lost some of its strain. “I merely did not stop it. Perhaps I hastened its progress a little.”

His listeners looked confused.

“You must understand that I was not thinking with my normal faculties. I don’t know how to describe what that state of being is like. Every idea exists as a separate mote. Some things are irresistibly attractive, and others cause an intense loathing. One is completely at the mercy of these impressions, but they are not without beauty or interest. The sheen of milk in a cup of tea could contain the whole universe. The best alphabet in the world, one that could contain all languages, could be chased by my crayon.”

He smiled when he saw my look of shame at depriving him of writing implements. “You did what you had to, to keep me safe. I begrudge you nothing, neither of my dear friends, for what you’ve done to help me.”

“Have you come to yourself because of Dr. Barnett?” I interrupted. “You seemed to be doing so much better when he started caring for you. Until you got worse.”

“Yes, there might be something to his methods. The clinics must have given me something that slowed me down but couldn’t bring me to fully sleep. That was an anguish with no escape, dear Watson, and for my scant sleep I am much indebted to Dr. Barnett. One day I woke up and attained something closer to normal awareness, but the tempo was wrong. I couldn’t communicate.”

“If only I’d tried harder to understand,” Jack put in.

“That is what you must comprehend, my lad: everything in me did not want you to. I had actually woken up out of my lethargy a few days before you noticed, but saw nothing to speak about. Life was still agony. I did note that I felt unusually weak, and found no will to get out of bed. Over the space of these days my mind struggled to make sense of what I was feeling. I was ill.

“You may remember I ever since coming to that room I had spend many hours staring at the wall. It contained some great import that eluded me. And even then it made no sense because you looked so well, Jack.”

The boy blushed.

“It is known that some people who have suffered arsenic poisoning in the home live with others who are completely unaffected,” Sherlock Holmes stated.

“There’s not a green article in the house,” I protested. “It was all done in blues.”

“Mr. Treacher judged it the most soothing,” Jack added, looking confused. “Why?”

“Don’t you remember the tragedy of Scheele’s green, the arsenic-based dye that was in everything from garments to shoes to wallpaper, and killed many unwary?” Though some scientists disputed the evidence, and the government had not made a ruling on it, the green dye had waned in popularity in recent years, and so had arsenic poisonings.

“You couldn’t have known,” Holmes’ fingers patted the lad’s sleeve. “There is nothing green in the flat. Not even Mr. Treacher could have known, and be sure to tell him I said so. The green paper was a muddy brown with caked dust, and the builders must have judged it easier to paper over it than take it up. I myself can attest to how firmly it is affixed to the wall.”

“Then how did you discover it?” I asked.

“Other than deducing from my symptoms that the garlic smell was not coming from one of the neighboring apartments? A pin. A single pin dropped off one of your friends’ clothes, dear Jack. They’re almost all on the stage, so it could have been transferred from a costume,” he comforted the lad.

“This pin was my godsend. With it I was assured, not only death, but death of my own design. A quick death. Demise when I desired it. There were so few moments when my night watchers slept, but at some point almost all of them did. Then it took patient work to prize up the blue paper behind the bed and then stick it back with chewed crayon so that no one was the wiser.”

“Holmes! Did you eat this paper?” I was scandalized. “You shouldn’t be alive. Some of that paper had enough grains of arsenic to kill a child with a nibble.”

The detective smiled ruefully. “My mind understood well enough that if I scrabbled at the paper with my fingernails I’d be found out immediately. So I chose to inch towards my own death more prudently. You saw me making ecstatic calculations of, given different concentrations of poison per inch, how many licks it would take to leave my suffering behind once and for all. It was a heady power.”

“I hope you haven’t done permanent damage to your tongue,” was all I could say to fill that horrified silence.

Jack gave a little sob. “You could have died. You very nearly died.”

“And that was what I needed, my friend, my friends. The end was close, and in my hazy thoughts something became clear: my mind had been steadily improving once I no longer had to worry about an interminable life stretching before me. Death invigorated me. It made me myself again. In short, I wish to go back to work.”

“You will do no such thing,” I said, surveying the weakened man in the bed.

“Your order was pronounced with something less than your normal fervor, Watson,” came the playful whisper. “You must have been affected by your short stay in my flat—listen to you wheezing—though Jack has been spared.”

“Which is why I’ll tie you to the bed if I have to. You don’t go back to work until I say so,” said the indomitable young man.

Holmes lay back and smiled very slightly. It wasn’t the smile he wore with Bruno. Nothing would bring that back. But it was a smile nonetheless. One of Sherlock Holmes’ greatest pleasures had always been revealing how he solved a mystery.

The next several weeks were busy ones. Mackie’s play was a raging success. Stanley was taking his bow every night, and I were happily making plans for a well-deserved holiday after the play closed (with much advice from the Asian aficionado Holmes). The recuperating detective was transferred back to Baker Street, which would soon house only Messrs. Holmes and Limstock while I was away.

It was I who insisted upon this arrangement. “Anyone will accept Mr. Limstock as your secretary and assistant,” I reasoned. “He’s so efficient as to be quite formidable. I do think Mrs. Hudson is in awe of him.”

My dear friend never spoke of Bruno or his loss, and of course no one else would dare mention it.

Life was too good not to focus on the living. My new life with my Stanley was about to begin.

One day, the miraculous man whom I finally found right in front of me—was lost.

 

 


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Watson receives a letter from Stanley, and Holmes finds a new lease on life.

Stanley didn’t show up at the theater one night.

Mackie sent two trusted stagehands to visit me at Baker Street. I had been to one other performance of that emotionally charged play, and that with grave misgivings because it was to accompany Sherlock Holmes.

Neither Jack nor I thought it wise for the recovering detective to dive straight back in to a version of his trauma. The weakened Holmes had begun displaying his restored faculties by coming up with elaborate plans to kill us, however, so when I woke up one morning and found an elaborate mechanism that could have delivered a spear to my face instead of a feather when I put my foot on the floor, I conceded defeat.

With a friend on either side, a formally dressed but still gaunt man leaned on a cane to enter and exit the theater. He shed no tear. He said nothing, in fact, neither during intermission nor after the lights went up, except, “Your Dougan is a genius, and your Stanley, a master.”

He said the same to the men when we saw them in the lobby. Mackie, I knew, was nervous about what his inspiration would think of his masterpiece.

“A heroic work, sir.”

“I’m so glad to see you better, Sherlock,” Dougan said. The last time he’d seen the detective had been on one of his periodic visits to the flat, or before that, the clinic. It was an enormous change. He embraced Holmes warmly, and Stanley kept Adam at bay with an imperious glance.

“Truth is the best tonic,” was the only thing Holmes said in reply. “Yet it has left me rather tired at the same time. I hope to see you soon, Mr. McLeod.”

Jack conveyed Holmes back to Baker Street, and I had gone with Stanley to his boat. “I wish I could hear your playing without all the wrenching drama in the background,” I’d remarked to my lover that night. That play brought us all back to the darkness that had come before, and I was ready to grow into the light that Stanley and I were finding together.

He had revealed to me that on some of the occasions when he would withdraw from the world, he would travel to France to meet with someone who tended his money. This solicitor did not know what Stanley did in England nor where he lived. Apparently he had enough respect for the Bohemian royal family, or perhaps for the youngest son, not to inquire too closely about his client’s life. This person was, in turn, connected to another solicitor in Stanley’s homeland, with whom financial information was exchanged and nothing else.

It was very cleverly done, especially for someone who felt a loathing for anything having to do with his family since his surrogate parents died.

“I become sad when I have to think of these things, so you see I do not want to be around anyone after I return,” he’d explained to me. “Every once in a while someone leaves me something in their will and I must prove I am still alive enough to receive these goods or moneys. Sometime I think I will just let them believe me dead. It would suit them all well.” His brow lowered.

“It’s just as well you didn’t. Think of all the place we can go together, love,” I consoled him. “Once we decide what we want to do, I can practice medicine and you can play with an orchestra, if you prefer. Let’s become who we want to be.”

And that’s what we were going to do. After the play closed, our end destination was to be India, but we had several stops planned along the way. We’d not yet bought the tickets because the play’s run was being extended, but our papers were in order for a quick departure after that.

Then the two stagehands came bounding up the stairs at Baker Street. “Have you seen him? He’s always in the theater all day before a show.”

“Who? Stanley? He’s not there?”

“No. He never came this morning to help with touching up the scenery like he does. Mackie is in a state, John. He could have some sort of fit at this rate. You must help.”

Not wishing to break my promise about keeping Stanley’s home a secret, I sent the men back to the theater with instructions to keep the backup violinist ready for at least the first act. I brought Jack, my bag and all my fears in the cab and then to the shore.

The rowboat was tied up. My fear had been that Stanley was lying in his boat, victim of some debilitating illness. The idea that he wasn’t there was even more ominous.

“We should go on board to see,” I said. Jack rowed us out to Stanley’s floating haven.

The door was unlocked and the interior in disarray. “A robbery, do you think?” Jack asked. “Could they have carried him off as well?”

“It would have taken several people to manage that,” I said in a hollow voice as I picked through the scattered papers. Stanley had few belongings unless you counted his musical instruments and his paints. His violin was so fine it was kept locked in Dougan’s safe at the theater. There was nothing to be found on his boat except some of the plans we’d sketched out for our travels.

“He’s not here, Doctor. We should inform Mr. Mackie and call the police.”

One piece of paper caught my eye. It was a program from the play, one of the ones Stanley had inscribed for me himself. In my haste to see Holmes at the hospital that night, I’d forgotten them.

The only one I could find was the one signed simply, “Stanley.”

As we rowed back, Jack thought to call out to some of the neighboring crafts if they’d seen anyone ransacking Stanley’s home.

No one had anything to say, until finally we passed the people who had carried me to the shore the night of Holmes’ emergency.

“It’s a bad business, Doctor,” one of them said. “No one wants to get involved with the police. I hope your friend isn’t in too much trouble.”

This made me feel marginally better. Wasn’t Stanley on some sort of list, according to Mycroft? We’d find him being released from some jail after a misunderstanding.

But the police claimed no knowledge of this strange Slav who was somehow implicated in the theater. Holmes sent word demanding an explanation from his brother, who wrote back that he didn’t know of anything happening to Stanley.

By this time, I was frantic. Who knew where Stanley lived, first of all? And secondly, what did they want with him?

This was not something I would find out for some time. Holmes ascertained that a man answering to Stanley’s description had crossed to France at Calais along with three other men of unidentified foreign origin. He had not seemed to be under any duress.

Holmes pressured the police until they forced Stanley’s bank to open his safety deposit box. There were his signet ring and a few other fine jewels, but otherwise the earnings were all from his theatrical and musical work. There were no records leading to his solicitor in France.

And there the matter rested for many months.  

I couldn’t believe that Stanley had left our future for any reason, but that was better than thinking him kidnapped.

My friends rallied around me but nothing short of concrete news would help me.

Holmes theorized that Stanley had always shown great care coming to and from his boat to prevent anyone from knowing exactly where he lived. We’d broken this practice on a few recent occasions, such as carrying Dougan’s picnic and the huge fuss Jack raised the night he came to fetch me to the hospital.

“I merely wanted to make sure you weren’t caught doing anything indecent,” Jack apologized.

“But I suspect what really drew undue attention to Stanley’s identity was his performance in this play,” Holmes said. “He’s always been behind the scenes, but recently he has taken a bow as the unidentified violinist everyone wants to know. He attended the premier in dress befitting his station, Watson, and you said the difference was quite remarkable.”

I couldn’t think about our perfect night without anguish. Holmes wisely let the subject be, and I learned to live with waiting as the near-cousin to hope.

During this waiting period my wonderful Mackie took me to his country home for weekends, or else for a brief evening at Treacher’s. One of these nights towards the end of my purgatory Mr. Treacher served me the dish made by the young chef Angelo, and it tasted of blood.

The act was done. Bruno’s murder—and Holmes’ near-death—was avenged. I was only glad that something had happened somewhere, for in my life everything was a standstill. Something I had intended had come to fruition. It had simply not been my future with Stanley.

Then one day I received a letter from France.

The large envelope contained a smaller envelope, a letter and a sheaf of papers. My heart pounding, I read aloud for Holmes and Mr. Limstock:

“Dear Dr. Watson,

“I have been the representative of a Bohemian royal, Stanislaus, the youngest in line for the throne who was recently deceased in his homeland.” I paused for a long moment. “His will instructs that you receive this letter in his hand, along with the particulars transferring the fortune I administered. The accompanying translations are from the man who has represented him in his native land all his life, so please accept my assurances that the man you know of as Stanley was not completely alone when he met his end.”

My voice gave out.

Holmes took the papers from me. I lit a cigarette with a trembling hand and listened to the story of what my lover had been doing these months.

Stanley had told me his family had eight children, five of them sons. It seems that the good supply of replacement heirs to the throne had been decimated in recent years, and there was but one male of the royal line left, in addition to Stanley’s brother, the king. The current monarch was of strong enough stock but assassination had already been attempted. The replacement was sickly, and thus my lover was suddenly more valuable to the kingdom.

“You must know that Mr. Stanislaus is very secretive: he did not tell me how his family came to remember him, and I assure you my correspondence was always addressed to a post office in England, so I did not divulge where he lived. It is only known that he was convinced to return to Bohemia, a place he had vowed never to set foot in again.”

It was a riding accident. This seems so unlikely to me even as I think of it now. Stanley was friends with various immigrant chauffeurs and groomsmen, and sometimes they let him take a little work so he could be around the horses that reminded him of his country childhood. There couldn’t be a less likely person to be thrown from a horse. I said so in a spectral voice.

“Anyone may come across a snake whilst in the saddle,” Holmes said gently.

“He was being groomed for the throne all these months, and he didn’t contact me?” I burst out. “It was his worst nightmare. I’d have rescued him!”

“Perhaps more answers await in this,” Holmes passed the envelope written in Stanley’s hand. “Jack and I need to return to our case.” I looked blank. “That of the poison bouquet.”

All of the detective’s cases ran together with Stanley gone.

“I’ll send Mr. Mackie to look in on you,” Jack said.

Abruptly I was so tired of everyone being _kind_ to me all these months I could take no more. Letter in hand, I slammed myself into my room.

The sight of that genteel handwriting wrested the first tear, and they didn’t stop flowing until long after I finished.

“My dearest John,

“I have only wanted to give you all of myself. When you accepted this gift I thought I should be never unhappy again. But I have come to realize that there are some things I would never wish to share with you. Please do not resent me for protecting you in this way.

“I belong in the theater, but I should have remained safe in the wings. For it was not too great of a chance that someone who knew the youngest son of my line was a big, blond man of strange habits who had not grown up at court. The only thing worth boasting about this son was his talent with a violin. The night I dressed up in fine clothes my resemblance to some forebear must have caught someone’s eye, and word was passed along until it reached Bohemia.

“Perhaps the matter would have gone no further had I not taken another step.

“You were so angry about what had happened to Mr. Holmes and his man, John. You talked to me about it on many occasions, your suspicions of everyone with no real target. These plots surrounding Bruno, this was the scheming I left behind in my home. Your heart has always been clear to me, my John. I knew how this anger was threatening to eat you alive, the kind, simple man whom I love.” Here my vision clouded for a moment. “And most of all, I did not wish you becoming entangled with that Treacher. For you were obviously thinking to ask the man to do something to ‘fix’ this tragedy, as he claims to do. When nothing could balance out the loss of such a complicated man.

“And so I sent a message. It was not through anyone you know me to know, so you cannot discover which person set the events in motion. All that I asked was that word reach a certain secret society thatthe Bohemian royals have employed for centuries. You might think of them as hereditary assassins, but really, all European nobles have these people on whom they can count completely. They are ‘fixers’ in their own way, and a good thing, for you cannot imagine how many incompetents have held thrones on the continent, and how many continue to do so.

“These European families and societies all know, or know of, each other. I recognized the attack on Bruno as the work of such a professional. You never understood, I think, just how interested the royal houses have been in the fate of the Roman state, Here is an ancient thing struggling to be reborn into a modern world, and the kings and queens have paid close attention to this example as a way to survive themselves.”

Stanley and I had never spoken of statecraft. His interest in Bruno had seemed to be only how the chimerical ex-priest affected Holmes, and therefore, me. My lover was always far more articulate on paper, but now I was reading this missive from a worldly man I wish I’d known better.

“My hope was that once you knew more of what had happened, you would be able to let the matter be. Above all, I hoped to prevent you from asking Mr. Treacher, and thus owing him a debt at some great cost. Unfortunately, I never received any definite information. And then they came for me.

“These men were hidden near where I tie up my rowboat. They were armed, of course, and made it clear that if I raised a fuss they knew where I had certain treasures hidden. Of course, the only thing I have of value is you.

“My family’s line has been descending in power and prestige for some time. There have been attempts against the king my brother. You met him—he doesn’t see much in front of his nose. My other brother has a heart ailment. Still, I believe they would have continued thinking of me as a half-wit had I not done something like an act of state—I sent a cleverly worded letter intimating some harm that might come to the secret society if they did not tell me what they knew of the murder of this Italian, without saying anything as such.

“They did know, John. Or they found out. I suspect the Austrians, who are connected with my lineage at some point, but this society would give me no proof. They promised me many things, but always at the cost of a little more time in that stifling court. One more examination by some specialist claiming to fix my impediment. Another fine lady to dance with. They even tried to tempt me in other ways as well. These foolish people thought that if they fitted me with enough fine clothes and sat me at the end of a long enough banquet table, I would wish to stay, the nearly-silent noble who could keep the throne going for a little longer.

“If you are reading this, then I never managed the escape I planned every day, always with the first thought to your safety. My mail was read, so there was no way to warn you the best way to steal away from the observation even I had not seen you were under. We would have had to live as vagabonds, you and I, but I would have come for you in some alley and stolen you to some land where we could be ourselves.

“My love, you have been the most honest and most wonderful thing in my life. Please regret nothing, for I wish nothing different. This day would come for me eventually. Even the low standards for monarchs would eventually sink to the blubbering youngest son. That, I would let them have. You had everything else. Live well and without anger, John. Go to India with your wealth. I think of us there often.

“Your man,

“Stanley.”

Dougan found me some time later, drunk to the point of stupor. When I couldn’t be roused, Mrs. Hudson measured the decanter of whiskey and claimed I’d had enough in a short period of time to send myself to an early grave. Thank goodness Dougan kept her from calling the ambulance.

“The last thing we need is the doctor losing his faculties now!” I heard her say at some point.

Saying he would take me for medical attention himself, Mackie had me loaded into a carriage, taking me instead to his country home. Adam Fairlie had been growing tired of the increased amount of time Dougan and I spent together since Stanley’s disappearance, making our shared lover pay the way a spiteful man knows how. When I finally awoke there the next day, very ill, all I could say was, “Adam is going to exact a price for you spending another weekend with me.”

“I know. I read the letter, John. It is devastating news. But perhaps,” he tipped my head so I would see his kind face, “You should start looking for a wife.”

“A what?” The attempt at laughter made the heaves return. I’d scarcely thought of women since meeting the only two men I would ever need.

I didn’t accede that day, nor on the other occasions when Dougan brought it up. I needed to mourn for Stanley, and in truth, the ardor I felt for women had turned out to be much paler than what I felt for men. But Sherlock and Jack were so perfectly suited they were throwing knives at each other at all hours. Dougan had Adam, and his million theater projects. I needed fertile ground in which to root myself, and as the lonely months stretched on I felt like giving up. The men’s clubs were painful reminders of all my time with Stanley. Despite my new wealth, my medical practice was a way of filling the empty hours.

Then I met my dear Aimee through one of Homes’ cases I still assisted with. We understood each other very well from the beginning. She, too, had had a love affair that burned out all too quickly with the intemperance of youth. We shared a great mutual respect, and on this we built our family. The riches were only touched for our children’s education or great emergencies, as I wanted to give my family the things money couldn’t buy. We never wanted for holidays or music lessons, but I had no desire to seek out a different social circle than the ones I inhabited rather clumsily.

I would have said Holmes never regained his youthful flush of love, but that was never clear to me. Jack could be very domineering, but I came to suspect it was a sort of game between them, after a while. For this young paramour, as he came to be, took a very different approach to Holmes’ excesses. He gave the detective a ration of hashish per week, with the understanding that if the man found more by other means, he would be punished. Once I came upon the artist’s den where the men moved after Holmes could put away the echoes of Bruno, and found Holmes in the most intricate network of chains.

“Jack caught me supplementing my weekly ration, Watson. I think he has all of London’s hashish merchants in his employ. No, no, I think I’ve nearly loosed myself. I wouldn’t wish for him to catch me asking for help on top of it all. Who knows what punishment that would bring,” Holmes said in the grips of some strange excitement. I wondered sometimes if these infractions on his part weren’t entirely deliberate.

It was not the passion he shared with Bruno, and I was relieved. That depth of feeling could be dangerous, I knew from personal experience. They had the bond of two men who had survived something together. No, the master sleuth and his protégé, the patient and his nurse had a more playful way of relating. They were great fun to be around. Everyone in my family agreed.

I never decided whether my desire for vengeance had made me indirectly responsible for Stanley’s death. Deep down, I thought so. My true failing, however, had been not to open myself to him sooner. If we had only started building a life together earlier, perhaps we could have talked openly about my decision to enlist Treacher’s help in seeing a murderer put to justice. For Bruno’s killer did die, and if he had been a member of one of these societies working to keep the European status quo, fine. I see it as having taken out one of that ilk who had absconded with my Stanley so that he would die far away from his real home.

I still feel no regrets, and suspect this is a sign that something in me had been unworthy of Stanley all along.

Mr. Treacher and I did not speak of the matter again, and I felt a comfort in his presence that I had no reason to root out anymore. At one point I did receive a final clue as to the identity of Bruno’s killer.

Irene Adler, the lady herself, breezed through London on her way between schemes. Jack Limstock was openly rude to this only woman who could challenge his place in Holmes’ affections. The detective himself was beside himself with all the information he desired to wrest from this lady, and thus managed to extract very little. She surveyed the state of Sherlock’s amorous affections and then turned to me, who was merely dropping by on my way to a family engagement.

“I hope you rest well at night,” she said.

“Of course, my children are not so young anymore,” I said, mistaking her meaning.

“It was very cleanly done, and the blade’s scabbard was worth less than the knife.”

We stared at each other. She could only be referring to the worthless scoundrel whose death I had sponsored.

“It was you who—?“

“Please, Doctor, I am the intelligence. I have long hired others to execute my will.”

“You know Mr. Treacher?” I said stupidly. It was hard to imagine this imposing woman towering over the little businessman.

“I know what I know,” she replied. “For instance, that you needn’t know any more about it.” She turned back to the conversation and then said over her shoulder. “Not Italy. You did make a great impression in Austria, however.”

That night I went home and dreamed of the magistrate chewing his moustaches over setting some chain of events in motion that ended in Bruno’s death. If he had not been part of Stanley’s destruction, someone like him was. As I got older, the particulars mattered less than the broad brushstrokes that together conveyed one of the outlines of my life: muddy, yet no less capable of drawing blood with a sharp edge. Every day I was surprised to find myself still living after the life I knew I was meant for had become impossible. Still, this second life was not devoid of charm.his secondlife I knew I was meant for had become impossible. Still, was not devoid of charm.

 

 


End file.
